Point of View

The book is written from the first-person perspective of Astri, a young girl who faces a series of trials and hardships in Norway. She is something of a romantic and is enamored with fairy tales. This makes her perspective unreliable and some aspects of the story are never fully explained.

Astri searches for some magical items that she believes will help her escape her harsh living situation and make it aboard a ship bound for America. She imagines that her captor, a mean goatherd named Svaalberd, might be a prince under the spell of the magical people of the land. She wishes for a pair of seven-league boots that will help her cover ground quickly but winds up with a horse instead. She wishes for a magic hairbrush and winds up selling her ordinary brush for some of the things she needs to get aboard...