Little, Brown Books for Young Readers 2012
A 2012 Andre Norton Award Finalist
A Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner

Princess Violet is plain, reckless, and quite possibly too clever for her own good. Particularly when it comes to telling stories. One day she and her best friend, Demetrius, stumble upon a hidden room and find a peculiar book. A forbidden book. It tells a story of an evil being, called the Nybbas, imprisoned in their world. The story cannot be true–not really. But then the whispers start. Violet and Demetrius, along with an ancient, scarred dragon-the last dragon in existence, in fact-may hold the key to the Nybbas’s triumph or its demise. It all depends on how they tell the story. After all, stories make their own rules. Iron Hearted Violet is a story about the power of stories, our belief in them, and how one enchanted tale changed the course of an entire kingdom.

Kelly says…

I started this book as a story to my daughters. We were staying in a little shack in the woods – no electricity, no running water – and telling stories by candlelight. My daughters asked me for a story, and I asked what kind, and they said, “Tell us a story about a princess. But not a pretty princess, because pretty princesses are boring.” Which, I will admit, is a fair point. I told them enough of a beginning to satisfy them enough to go to bed, and then, in the days and weeks to follow, I started writing out chapters and reading them to my daughters at night from my notebook.

But what started out as a fairly simple fairy tale that happened to wrestle with the Beauty Myth started unexpectedly interacting with all sorts of other things I had been thinking about and learning and questioning. None of this was intentional, you understand — the mind is a funny thing after all. And the imagination borrows from the mind’s curiosities, which borrows from the mind’s intellectual meanderings, which brings us right back to the imagination. I had gone to an astronomy workshop for science fiction authors earlier that summer, where I attended a lecture on the theory of multiple universes. And that made its way into the book. And my earlier history as an erstwhile theology major also found its way in. Then dragon lore. The Book of Demonology by King James the First. The Key of Solomon. Some interesting facts about animal husbandry. Cool bits of architecture. And so forth.

I wrote this book entirely longhand, in a little moleskin notebook that fit in my purse, all in bits and pieces when the kids were napping or playing in the park or engaged in a project. 

Reviews:

“Barnhill inverts common fairy-tale notions…[and creates] the most inventive rendition of architecture since J.K. Rowling conjured Hogwarts….Poetic.”
— The New York Times Book Review

“A splendid fantasy…layered and complex, Barnhill’s story brings a modern feel to age-old fairy tale tropes.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Storytelling plays a key role in the book, intriguingly blurring the line between what is real and what is imaginary….Triumphant.”
— The Horn Book

“Wonderful read-aloud potential…with a likable hero and heroine, a well-paced plot, and a daunting villain.”
— Booklist

“[Violet] is a princess for our century.”
— VOYA