Trip Abroad Research Articles

THE STUDY OF S. S. UVAROV’S ACTIVITY IN SUPPORTING PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS DURING THE INTRODUCTION OF LANCASTER SCHOOLS IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE XIX CENTURY

The article actualizes the issues of the emergence of a new method of teaching at the lowest level of education in Russia at the beginning of the XIXth century, namely the Bell - Lancaster method of mutual learning, which at that time was considerably popular in European countries. The research aims to analyze, on the study of archival documents, the position and actions of S. S. Uvarov on the issue of sending students of the Main Pedagogical Institute from St. Petersburg to England to study on the spot the features of applying the method of mutual learning and to promote his own ideas for the development of education. The methodological basis of the research is the study of a specific historical and pedagogical phenomenon in the context of a biographical approach. The author substantiates the idea that the role of the trustee of St. Petersburg Educational District in the selection, methodological training of students, their accompaniment on a trip abroad was extremely high, and was also aimed not only at the successful acquisition of knowledge and skills by students, but also at promoting their own ideas for the development of education in the country. The documents prepared personally by S. S. Uvarov are highlighted and characterized, as well as the actions taken by him and aimed at changing the promoted decision on the introduction of the mutual learning method in the Russian Empire. The historical evidence accompanying the consideration of the idea of opening the Second category Main Pedagogical Institute as a special institution for teacher training is shown. The evidence is indicated and argued that S. S. Uvarov formulated a document that allowed accompanying students who went to study abroad.

Travel Notes by A. N. Karamzin in Personal and Creative Fate of E. P. Rostopchina

The article is devoted to the letters of A. N. Karamzin, sent to his family in Russia during his trip abroad (from May 1836 to October 1837). For the first time, Karamzin’s correspondence was published 60 years after his death in several books of the historical collection “Antiquity and Novelty” (1914–1916). The travel notes of the son of the famous historiographer N. M. Karamzin, written in a lively style, not devoid of poetry, has not yet been introduced into full scientific circulation. The article establishes the fact of acquaintance of E. P. Rostopchina, a well-known poetess by that time, with the letters of A. N. Karamzin. According to the tradition of that time — the era of “universal confession” — letters were publicly read out in the salon of his mother E. A. Karamzina. The acquaintance of the poetess with the letters of A. N. Karamzin is evidenced by the “Album ...” by E. P. Rostopchina, stored in the RGALI. It contains separate fragments from Karamzin’s letters, which served as the beginning of their acquaintance, which developed into a close relationship. A comparative analysis of Karamzin’s texts and Rostopchina’s works makes it possible to clarify some obscured parts in the writer’s personal and literary biography.

Заключительные «Исторические письма» В.И. Ламанского (предисловие к публикации)

The article introduces the publication of the fragments of the sixth “Historical Letter on the Attitude of the Russian People to their Tribesmen” and the conclusion prepared by Vladimir Ivanovich Lamansky, a Slavophile and professor at St. Petersburg University. It is noted that other works of the scientist, on which he worked in the following years, remained unfinished. The facts allowing to indicate the date of writing the “Historical Letters” are given: 1859–1862, work interrupted by Lamansky's trip abroad (1862–1864). It is suggested that the “Historical Letters” were a continuation of the research direction outlined by Lamansky in his master's thesis “On the Slavs in Asia Minor, Africa and Spain” (1859), i.e. they were the result of his archival and desk work. The trip to the Slavic lands enriched the scholar with real knowledge of the Slavic peoples, their history and current situation, which made many of the arguments in the “Historical Letters” irrelevant. There are two subjects that Lamansky touched upon in his “last” letters, and which were further developed in his research and work. Firstly, these are the works in the field of national ethnography: his long-term leadership of the ethnographic department of the Russian Geographical Society, the organisation of the Slavic Congress and the Ethnographic Exhibition in 1867, the publication of the ethnographic journal “Zhivaya starina” (1890), the project of the of the ethnographic department of the Russian Museum (1899). Lamansky's statements on ethnography as fatherland studies or ethnology are presented, revealing his understanding of ethnographic science. Secondly, this is a historiosophical interpretation of the Oriental Question, considering it as an episode of interaction between two civilisations: the Greco-Slavic and the Romano-Germanic. The incompleteness of the “Historical Letters” is pointed out, which is reflected in the gaps in their publication.

Sentimental Value on Medical Tourism: A Social Congruence Theory Perspective

Medical tourism is a trip abroad that is carried out by someone whose aim is to get health care, both general check-ups, treatment and rehabilitation. The most popular destination countries for medical tourism are India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. The number of Indonesians who travel to neighboring countries to get medical services is quite large. The number of Indonesian patients who go to Malaysia is 70% and Singapore is 65% of the total international patients undergoing treatment in the country. In general, people who undergo medical tourism are people who have more economic capacity. Medical tourism or often referred to as medical tourism is a new tourism innovation or a health service program in the form of health maintenance, improvement and recovery packaged in the form of tourism activities. This study aims to determine the effect of functional values, hedonic values , and sentimental values on behavioral intention in the medical tourism sector. This research uses a quantitative approach with online surveys. The analysis tool used is Structural Equation Modelling Partial Least Square with a sample of 100 respondents for patients visiting middle to upper-class hospitals for examination or treatment or rehabilitation of their health after or suffering from illness in Indonesia and Malaysia. The results of this study indicate that functional values and hedonic values affect sentimental values, and functional values, hedonic values , and sentimental values affect behavioral intentions. So, it can be concluded that all relationships between variables are influential and significant.

Влияние эксклавности и уровня доходов населения на потребительские предпочтения пациентов на рынке медицинских услуг

The article presents the results of a qualitative analysis of the influence of exclavity and the level of income of the population on the consumer preferences of patients in the medical services market using the Kaliningrad region as an example. Economic disparity in access to healthcare services contributes to the psychographic stratification of healthcare consumer preferences. Territorial isolation from the country and the proximity of foreign countries leave an imprint on the social and economic life of the population of an exclave subject and commitment to medical tourism. M a t e r i a l s a n d m e t h o d s . In the period from September to November 2022, a one-time comparative study of consumer preferences for choosing a country and a medical organization in the medical services market of 773 working-age residents of the Russian Federation was planned and conducted. All respondents were stratified into two groups according to their place of residence: residents of the Central Federal District and the Kaliningrad Region. The groups were comparable in terms of gender and age. Methods used: open online survey, qualitative analysis, statistical. The significance of differences in the percentages of the trait was estimated by the Fisher angular transformation coefficient (φ) with a given confidence level of 95%. R e s u l t s . The influence of exclavity and income level on consumer preferences for choosing a medical organization has been established. The features of the priority motivators for the choice of public, private or foreign medical services of the respondents of the Kaliningrad region are revealed. The comfort of receiving medical services (“lack of queues”) was 1,4 times more likely to motivate the choice of private medicine among respondents in the Kaliningrad region compared to respondents in other regions. The demand for the services of private and foreign clinics in the exclave territory is proportional to the level of income. Medical tourism services were used by 28,7% of respondents from the exclave territory who prefer private medicine. C o n c l u s i o n . A distinctive feature of consumers of medical services in the exclave Kaliningrad region is the increase in demand for private medicine and treatment abroad in proportion to the increase in income levels. Respondents from the exclave territory are 1,4 times more likely to choose private clinics and 23,9 times more likely to use medical tourism services compared to residents of the Central Federal District. Every fourth respondent in the Kaliningrad region does not trust the quality of training of doctors in the Russian Federation. Transport accessibility of the EU countries, dissatisfaction with the level of training of medical personnel, the lack of a number of medical services in the Russian Federation, the ability to realize the desire to combine treatment with a trip abroad with a sufficient level of income of the population in the exclave region, along with a shortage of medical personnel in the subject, contribute to increasing the attractiveness of private medical organizations, import of medical services and outflow of patients abroad. Recommendations are given to increase the attractiveness of state medicine in the exclave territory.

A randomized controlled trial of an online alcohol and sexual risk prevention program for college students studying abroad

IntroductionAmerican college students who study abroad experience increases in their drinking behavior, concerning risky sexual behaviors, and high rates of sexual violence while abroad. Despite these concerns, institutions offer limited programming to students prior to departure to address these risks and no empirically supported interventions currently exist that are targeted toward preventing increased drinking, risky sexual behavior, and sexual violence abroad. To help address alcohol and sexual risk abroad, we designed a brief, single-session online predeparture intervention focused on risk and protective factors known to associate with alcohol and sexual risk abroad. MethodsUsing a sample of 650 college students from 40 home institutions, we conducted a randomized controlled trial of the intervention and tested its effects on drinking (drinks per week, binge drinking frequency, alcohol related-consequences), risky sexual behaviors, and sexual violence victimization during the trip abroad (first month, last month abroad) and one-month and three-months after return home. ResultsWe observed small, but nonsignificant, intervention effects on drinks per week and binge drinking days during the first month abroad and three months after they had returned home to the United States, and small, significant effects on risky sexual behaviors during the first month abroad. The study found no observable effects at any time point for alcohol-related consequences or for sexual violence victimization abroad. ConclusionsThough mostly nonsignificant, small initial intervention effects were promising in this first empirical test of an alcohol and sexual risk prevention program for study abroad students. However, students may need more intensive programming with booster sessions to experience lasting intervention effects during this particularly high-risk period. ClinicalTrials.gov identifierNCT03928067

Mary Hayden Irish Historian and Feminist 1862–1942 by Joyce Padbury

Joyce Padbury, Mary Hayden Irish Historian and Feminist 1862–1942 (Dublin: Arlen House, 2021), 362 pages. In his foreword to this captivating biography of Mary Hayden by Joyce Padbury, historian Donal McCartney says that Hayden’s chief contribution to independent Ireland was as a feminist. Her campaigns were for the equal rights of women, especially in education and suffrage. Her scholarly output was modest but this reflected the custom of the time in the university, which placed emphasis on teaching rather than research. She held the Chair of Modern Irish History in UCD, the successor to the Catholic University, for twenty-three years. Padbury identifies the origin of Hayden’s feminism in her efforts to escape from the conventional life centred on marriage and family then expected of women. Mary Hayden was born in May 1862 at 30 Harcourt Street, where her parents and older brother lived. A sign of changed times, her old home is now the location of the night club, Copper Face Jacks, named after Lord Earlsfort who had once resided in Harcourt Street. Mary’s father, Thomas, was a professor in the School of Medicine in the Catholic University. Like her father, her mother Mary Ann (Ryan) came from Tipperary. Mary’s brother, John, comes across as something of a dreamer compared with his seriousminded sister. Her mother died when Hayden was aged eleven and her father would die when she was twenty. It appears that for a time Mary found it hard to settle at school. She spent a couple of years as a boarder at the Ursuline convent in Thurles; then she transferred to Mount Anville, where she remained for just two weeks before transferring to the day school. She also spent time at Miss Cantwell’s school in Mountjoy Square. At age sixteen she moved to Alexandra College where she found a home for her questing, independent spirit. Teachers at Alexandra, especially Alice Oldham and Isabella Mulvany who advocated higher education for women, had a big influence on Hayden. Mulvany, headmistress of Alexandra at age twenty-six, became both role model and friend. Following private study and some relevant courses in private tutorial colleges, Hayden graduated with a BA in English, German, French and Modern Literature in 1885 from the Royal University, an examining body which allowed women to take degrees. Two years later she proceeded to an MA. It seems that at this time a traditional marriage was off the agenda. She remarked in her diaries, ‘a husband might get in my way’. On another Studies • volume 110 • number 439 375 Autumn 2021: Book Reviews occasion, she remarked that as for babies, it could be ‘all well enough if one found them in the cabbage plants’. These diaries are the primary source available to Padbury for twenty-five years of Hayden’s life from age fifteen to forty. In her twenties Hayden showed an appetite for travel. An early trip abroad was to Bonn in 1885 to study German. For someone with limited income and who worried about her finances, she managed a remarkable amount of travel which included several months in Athens, visits to Spain, India, North Africa and North America. Following the passing of the Irish Universities Act in 1908 and the establishment of the National University of Ireland, Hayden set her sights on the university world and she obtained a lectureship in Modern Irish History. In 1911 she was appointed to the Chair of Modern Irish History, a position she would hold until she retired, somewhat reluctantly, at age seventy-six when she was succeeded by her former student, Robin Dudley Edwards. At the same time as she was appointed to the Chair, she was also appointed to the Governing Body along with fellow academic Agnes O’Farrelly. Hayden did not engage in party politics. It may seem surprising that a woman ‘almost a Unionist’ adopted Home Rule. She supported the Irish Parliamentary Party although John Redmond had opposed votes for women. She supported non-violence and, although a friend of Pearse through the Gaelic League, she did not support the 1916 Rising. Like some other professors in UCD at the time, she supported the Treaty and the Cumann...

Her trip abroad: Middle-class travels and feminism in women-centric popular Hindi movies

ABSTRACT This article examines the significance of the trip abroad and its limits in two women-centric popular Hindi movies, English Vinglish (2012) and Queen (2014). The two movies are similar in that the female protagonist’s trip is central to the plot, and as the female character leaves her middle-class Hindu family in India and experiences new environments and friendships in the West, she realizes and renegotiates both her own location and identity. In spite of these ventures, the female protagonist remains focused on gaining self-respect and loyal to the nation. As a result, the two women-centric popular Hindi movies remain limited in scope, assuming a shift in the Indian patriarchal system rather than challenging the framework.

Sara Jahan Hamara: Indian Films and Their Portrayal of Foreign Destinations

This article explores the connection of Hindi and Tamil films with outbound tourism from India. Some of the older Hindi and Tamil films portrayed foreign locations and their cultures in quite critical ways. Often protagonists in earlier films would go for a short trip abroad for immediate career-related needs and then return faithfully to their motherland. However, after the 1990s, Indians emerged as a confident globe-trotting people covering the entire planet for their career as well as tourism needs. This changing national trend accordingly found a voice in contemporary films too. Additionally, Indian films are increasingly sought after by dozens of countries from many parts of the world, not just by their respective consumers but also by their respective tourism boards and other agencies, so as to promote inbound tourism by Indians to those countries. Finally, this article concludes with the postmodern analysis of some of the contemporary Hindi films in the 21st century that are transcending spatial and other kinds of barriers in a truly globalized world.

Planning a trip abroad with a resident

A trip abroad is an opportunity to learn and relax and it is important that residents who want to travel are given the opportunity. Adrian Ashurst talks through a case study, setting out what preparations and precautions are needed.

海外家族旅行が子どもにもたらす効果について : ハワイの事例研究(優秀賞,太田記念国際観光懸賞論文 受賞論文)

海外家族旅行が子どもにもたらす効果について : ハワイの事例研究(優秀賞,太田記念国際観光懸賞論文 受賞論文)

A Comedian Sees the World

A Comedian Sees the World

Intersections of Feminisms and Neoliberalism: Post-State-Socialist Estonia in a Transnational Feminist Framework

Intersections of Feminisms and NeoliberalismPost-State-Socialist Estonia in a Transnational Feminist Framework Raili Marling (bio) and Redi Koobak (bio) The first European Feminist Research Conference took place in August 1991 in Aalborg, Denmark. More than ninety women from Eastern Europe were invited as well, including several women from Estonia, for whom this was their first trip abroad and their first encounter with international academic feminist circles. In an emotional interview, a sociologist from Estonia recalled arriving at the conference center on August 19 to find Eastern European women crying.1 There was panic, fear and despair. She recounted that CNN was only showing news from Moscow and there was silence about what was happening in the Baltic states. The organizers were compassionate and trying to be helpful but did not fully grasp the circumstances. The contrast between the day and the night was indescribable: during the day, sitting among hundreds of European feminists, being taken aback by the variety of issues that seemed totally alien to her, and at night, sitting by the phone, trying to reach her loved ones back home in the heady days when Estonia regained its independence from the Soviet Union. This scene from the oral history project that traces the various trajectories of Estonian feminisms since the 1990s evokes the turbulent context of postsocialist transformations in which feminism reemerged in Estonia.2 Building on this research, we are interested in exploring the changing position of Estonian feminisms within the post-state-socialist period, characterized by predominance of a neoliberal ethos in the political sphere.3 In particular, we anchor our discussion in the complex interplay of various localized feminisms and the country's neoliberal consensus. The neoliberal framework has also shaped the development of alternative social philosophies and movements, among them feminisms largely focused on individual rights of women in a context that has discouraged economic and class-based critiques. This creates interesting parallels with recent US analyses on the emergence of neoliberal feminism and its role in the erosion of social justice.4 For example, Hester Eisenstein [End Page 1] claims that feminist vocabulary of women's personal empowerment has been used to facilitate neoliberal globalization.5 In Estonia, we suggest, the neoliberal context has created feminisms that have gradually expanded out of the narrow confines of "feminism-by-design" that is aligned with the agenda of the neoliberal elites of the country toward eventually gaining a more radical voice to raise uncomfortable questions about economic inequality and global power relations. As our opening story indicates, the reemergence of Estonian feminism is inextricably interwoven with the narratives of Estonia regaining independence from the Soviet regime, and it exists in a larger transnational context that both embraces and misreads it. We believe that focusing our discussion on the intersections of feminisms and neoliberalism in the Estonian context also raises a larger question of how to talk about issues at the level of the nation-state in the wider context of transnational feminist theory that has, from its inception, been committed to breaking from nation-centric visions of the world and to "destabilizing fixed geographies and seeing the intersections and hybridity of power."6 While feminist praxis in Estonia has been enriched by international academic and activist knowledge-formation, it has at the same time remained very Estonia-centered and Eurocentric. The prevalent focus on the nation-state and (Western) Europe has thus discouraged critical dialogues between Estonian feminists and transnational feminist theory. As a result, the failure to engage with critical transnational feminist paradigms has cut feminist discourses in Estonia off from productive critiques of coloniality and neoliberalism, at least until recently. Another broader issue we engage with is that most transnational feminist analyses have tended to marginalize the perspectives from post-state-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE).7 They thereby become complicit in erasing certain parts of the world, and ways of life, from the realm of relevant knowledge.8 According to Jennifer Suchland, for instance, the critical language of transnational feminism recreates Cold War–era "three-worlds metageography" in its articulation of place, difference, and power, conflating the "third world" with the "transnational."9 Suchland sees the reasons for the...

Australian Women Writers Abroad

Australian Women Writers Abroad

Transforming a Trip Abroad Into an Experiential Exercise in Entrepreneurship

At some point in their careers, many professors ponder the idea of taking a group of students abroad. This notion is especially true for entrepreneurship professors interested in exposing students to international entrepreneurship. In this article, we discuss how a professor and a student organization turned organizing a study abroad trip to China into an experiential exercise in entrepreneurship by creating and managing a short-term business to fund and plan the trip. Specific recommendations for a new set of entrepreneurial experiential best practices are outlined and illustrated.

The Boy Ripley Followed: Pym as Source for Highsmith’s Killer

The Boy Ripley Followed:Pym as Source for Highsmith’s Killer Paul Thifault (bio) To readers of Henry James, there is something very familiar about the premise of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley: An American bachelor of modest means and ambiguous sexuality is forever changed when he is sent to Europe, all expenses paid, to retrieve the prodigal son of wealthy East Coast industrialists.1 By borrowing this plot from James’s The Ambassadors (1903), Highsmith links her work to the tradition of “serious” American literature. Like her title character, Highsmith aims at this elite status through a sort of forgery, airbrushing the Jamesian classic into a genre tale of murder and suspense (imagine if Strether had decided to kill Chad Newsome, assume his identity, and snuff out little Bilham for good measure). Eager for us to get the joke, Highsmith even has Tom Ripley consider stealing a copy of The Ambassadors from the ship’s library on his trip abroad (Talented 35). Despite this playfulness, such allusions reveal Highsmith’s significant postmodern revision of the American expatriate paradigm, as an amoral and materialistic criminal will commodify and fabricate Strether’s epiphanies of self-discovery and cultural enlightenment.2 In this way, marking Highsmith’s engagement with canonical texts not only highlights the subtleties of her own project but also underscores crime fiction’s roots in the American canon, contributing to what Frederic Jameson calls the “effacement … of the … frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture” (2). Like Highsmith, I call attention to the The Ambassadors to hint at the importance of intertextuality to Ripley’s design. While critics routinely note Highsmith’s stylistic and philosophical influences, scholars have done little more than point to James’s novel when looking for key intertexts.3 Surely, The Ambassadors provides a familiar opening scenario for The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Strether’s narrative offers no point of origin for Ripley’s crimes. In the end, such a narrow view of the plot’s sources threatens to reinscribe the highbrow/lowbrow divide by suggesting that only the novel’s initial premise, and not its entrenched crime narrative, invokes the complex intellectual questions that we tend to associate with high art. My goal is to better situate Ripley’s criminality in relation to American literary history by showing how Highsmith’s novel operates in close connection with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Scholars have yet to examine the parallels between Ripley [End Page 312] and the only novel of Poe, Highsmith’s birthday twin, even though both texts follow the macabre adventures of a young, displaced American from New England who harbors a strong psychological association with another young man. Ripley and Pym begin their journeys with similar schemes, using fraud to insinuate themselves into father-son relationships that center on the son’s entry into the father’s nautical business (Mr. Greenleaf is a prominent shipbuilder, and Mr. Barnard, an eminent ship captain). Like Ripley’s obsessive identification with Dickie Greenleaf, Pym believes that he shares with Augustus “an intimate communion [that] had resulted in a partial interchange of character” (19), and these friends, whom the main characters idolize, both die gruesomely and unexpectedly, on boats, midway through these books, shattering the protagonists’ ties to America, and christening them into adulthoods of wandering and cold calculation.4 Last, both books conclude with protagonists sailing toward an unknown future manned by apocalyptic, static “figures” of judgment (Pym sails toward the ambivalent “shrouded human figure” in the cataract, and Ripley imagines the “figures” of “four motionless policemen” waiting on the pier [Poe 217; Highsmith, Talented 273]). Such parallels warrant a close reading of the novels in tandem. However, I am as concerned with proving that Highsmith consciously borrows from Pym as I am with showing how The Talented Mr. Ripley is animated by the same sophisticated aesthetic strategies that scholars today attribute to Poe’s much-admired canonical work. My two related claims will be that—first—Poe’s complex use of race should guide our interpretation of homosexuality’s function in Highsmith’s novel; and, second, that antebellum...

First Trip Abroad: Expectations, Experiences and Stories of Transnational Romanians

Abstract The paper analyzes transnational Romanians’ stories about their first trip abroad. The concept of physical mobility is seen in a broader framework for understanding transnational and cosmopolitan behaviours as well as international migration. In order to distinguish between different types of travelling for the first trip abroad the article is constructed keeping in mind the structural changes and constraints regarding physical mobility for Romanian citizens. During the process of transition from a communist country to the status of EU member, Romanian citizens’ stories about travelling abroad for the first time fundamentally changed. Labour migrants, asylum seekers, business travellers, students or tourists left the countries with different expectations and faced different problems at destination. Their attitudes toward origin and destination framed their images about the first trip abroad. Using a qualitative approach and samples of Romanians who live in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom, the analysis emphasizes certain differences between different types of travelling for the first time abroad and reconstructs how Romanians started their transnational careers

Education in Finland: Reflections from a Field Trip Abroad

Education in Finland: Reflections from a Field Trip Abroad

The Last Trip Abroad of a Soviet Russian Globetrotter: Boris Pilʼnjakʼs Northern Journey in 1934

The article explores the Soviet Russian writer Boris Pilʼniakʼs journey through Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Poland in the summer of 1934. In the Nordic countries he gave interviews, talking about modern Soviet literature and his own writings. Meetings were arranged with local writers and publishers. Afterwards, Pilʼnjak summarized his impressions in the essay ‘Kamen’, neboʼ (‘Stone, Heaven’), published in Novyi mir. In this article attention is paid to the possible political implications of the journey, which was to be Pilʼniakʼs last trip abroad before his execution in 1938.

Princess of the Wild Swans (review)

Reviewed by: Princess of the Wild Swans Kate Quealy-Gainer Zahler, Diane . Princess of the Wild Swans. Harper/HarperCollins, 2012. [224p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-06-20049-2-5 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-06-210202-7 $8.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 4-6. When the widowed king of Tiramore returns from a trip abroad with a new bride at his side, his five sons are initially enchanted by the woman's beauty; however, their younger sister, Princess Meriel, is suspicious, especially after her brothers are mysteriously shipped off to school in the middle of the night. With the help of her new friends, two common children who also happen to be half-witches, Meriel discovers that the flock of swans that has recently taken residence at the castle's lake are in fact her brothers, that the new queen is a witch intent on destroying the king and his children, and that she wants to rule both Tiramore and the Faerie underworld herself. The loquacious and utterly un-domestic Meriel must sew six shirts from nettles completely in silence in order to break the spell on her brothers and save the kingdom, all while trying to elude the queen's ire. Zahler weaves in a bit of pagan lore with her inclusion of the faerie world, but this is otherwise a mostly faithful retelling of Andersen's "The Wild Swans," here featuring a likable but somewhat bland heroine and a richly detailed setting. Although Meriel is a fairly predictable style of plucky princess with no interest in her princess duties, some of the secondary characters here are wonderfully developed, particularly the half-witches she befriends, and their complicated relationships with the royal family reveal more about Meriel and her family than the princess' unexamined narration. As with her other fairy-tale interpretations (The Thirteenth Princess, BCCB 3/10, etc.), Zahler shines in her ability to set an exquisite scene, and her descriptions of both the luxury of royal life and the more cozy aspects of a commoner's cottage will bewitch fans of Andersen's original. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois