Bradley, Kimberly Brubaker.
THE LACEMAKER AND THE PRINCESS 
New York : Margaret K. McElderry Books, c2007.
IL 3-6, RL 4.8
ISBN 1416919201

(2 booktalks)

Imagine that you are eleven years old, and every day you must work in order to make enough money to eat. You hand sew lace all day long in a crowded, dirty room, the same room in which you live with your sick mother and harsh grandmother.  You sew and you dream, dream of the riches of the palace of the King and his family.  The Lacemaker and the Princess is the story of such a girl, eleven-year-old Isabelle, living in France in the late 1700s, a third-generation lace maker.   One day, she gets to make a delivery to the palace and seizing the opportunity, Isabelle snoops to see all she can outside her own world.  She gets caught up in a crowd, trips and is almost trampled but is rescued by the queen Marie Antoinette. The queen decides that Isabelle should meet Princess Marie-Therese, who chooses Isabelle to be her friend. Now, Isabelle gets to live the dream of the palace.  She gets to eat like the princess, wear clothes like the princess, learn to ride horses like the princess. It is no wonder it is hard to go home every day and work like she always had.  The difference in the world between the working masses and the few elite of France are obvious, and the revolution boils over while Isabelle finds who she is and where she fits in.   (New Hampshire Great Stone Face nominee, 2008-2009)

Booktalk #2

When Isabelle delivers lace to the French palace, she enters the exciting world of Marie Antoinette, the French queen whose lack of concern for the poor helped provoke the French Revolution. The queen invites Isabelle to become a companion to her daughter, the Princess Therese. Isabelle is given new clothes and even a new name, and for those few hours a day, she becomes Clochette , living as the Princess lives. But she is not a member of the royal family and when tensions build between the King and the common people, these two girls and their friendship will be tested in ways beyond imagining.  (Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards nominee, 2008-2009)