(back to Primer booklist)
The King's Equal, by Katherine Paterson
In some ways, it's a typical fairy tale. What I like about it, though, is that the princess does not fit the stereotypes on either end of the spectrum. (She's neither a damsel in distress nor a great warrior, just a person.) She does fit into the humble peasant girl category, and does go on to marry the king, but she had no interest in being rescued from poverty, and she definitely didn't have any interest in the king. She wouldn't marry him until he lived in a cabin in the woods for a year and learned to be a real human being, and while he was gone she took charge of the country to fix all of his mistakes. A pretty good role model for the Primer, I think.
If you like this, you might also like some of these (older audience, though):
-any book by Gail Carson Levine (the humorous side of fairly tales)
-books by Donna Jo Napoli (darker side of fairy tales) who is also a linguistics professor at Swarthmore
-The Rumpelstiltskin Problem, by Vivian Vande Velde
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