One day, a messenger from the king unexpectedly arrives in the village and announces that the nation's priests have determined that, despite the lack of education provided for the villagers and the prejudice that exists between the mountain villagers and the lowlanders, the crown prince's future bride will come from Mount Eskel. She is very close to her father and her sister, Marda, as well as a boy named Peder, for whom she harbors feelings. However, Miri helps by bargaining with the traders. Because her father refuses to allow her to work in the quarry, she feels like an outcast in the community and cut off from the culture focused around a shared working life.

The quarry workers cut linder (a fictional type of expensive stone), which they sell to the lowlander traders for food and other necessities. Miri is a fourteen-year-old girl from Mount Eskel, an isolated territory of Danland, who has never been allowed to work with the rest of the villagers in the quarry that keeps the community alive. She also drew upon her own experience growing up in Salt Lake City, Utah, when writing about Mount Eskel and used medieval Scandinavian names for many of the characters.

Writing the songs that appear at the beginning of each chapter took Hale about a year. She has said that the fictional nation of Danland is 'in the same world as Bayern but on a different continent and in a different time'. Hale drew from the similar concepts of speaking through wind, fire, and water found in her Books of Bayern series to develop this idea of communicating through stone. Her first draft didn't include the concept of 'quarry-speech' and was added in the second. Hale first came up with the idea for Princess Academy while writing her first novel, The Goose Girl her husband, Dean Hale, was reading a fiction book about a tutor to a princess, which prompted Hale to develop the idea of a group of 'princesses in training'. It is the first in the Princess Academy series, followed by Princess Academy: Palace of Stone and Princess Academy: The Forgotten Sisters. The book was named a 2006 Newbery Honor winner as well as a New York Times Bestseller.

It tells the story of fourteen-year-old Miri who attends a princess academy that will determine who wins the hand of the prince. Princess Academy is a fantasy novel exploring themes of families, relationships, and education by Shannon Hale published on June 16, 2005, by Bloomsbury.

Princess Academy by Shannon Hale