The Ordinary Princess

The Ordinary Princess is a children's novel written and illustrated by M. M. Kaye and published in 1984. It opens the way Sleeping Beauty does, with the birth of a princess and the arrival of fairies who have been invited against the king's better judgement for the sake of tradition, and one of them gives the baby a gift nobody asked for.

The gift is ordinariness. The fairy Crustacea tells her plainly that she shall be ordinary, and Amy is: while her six older sisters are beautiful, she has mousy hair and freckles and prefers playing in the woods to fine clothes and the harp. When she finds out that her parents intend to hire a dragon so that a foreign prince can rescue her from it and so win her hand, she climbs down the wisteria outside her window and leaves.

In the Forest of Faraway she makes friends with a crow called Peter Aurelious and a squirrel called Mr Pemberthy, and because her clothes have worn out she needs money and therefore a job. She becomes the fourteenth assistant kitchen-maid in the castle of the King of Ambergeldar, where she meets a man-of-all-work named Peregrine, and the two of them turn out to have more in common than either expects.