The Orphelines in the Enchanted Castle is the fourth book in a five book series about a group of French orphans, “orphelines”, who live together with their guardian, Madame Flattot and her caretaker assistant, Genevieve. This volume begins:
“Once upon a time there were twenty beautiful French princesses who were going to live in an enchanted castle with their fairy godmother and their thirty knights. . . The noble knights were the boy orphans who would share the castle with them. And the castle was to be their new orphanage. It was in the forest of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, waiting for them to bring it to life again–as the prince had done in THE SLEEPING BEAUTY OF THE WOODS.”
Of course, the real orphan girls don’t always act like princesses, and the orphan boys who come to live in the castle with them are not the most noble of knights. The story tells how the girls learn to temper their imaginations with good sense and to behave themselves even when the boys can’t or won’t. And the boys, some of whom come from the streets of Paris and are quite uncivilized, are introduced to a French version of Lord Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts and to Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and thereby with some help from the girls and from Genevieve, become quite chivalrous wolf cubs and doers of good deeds.
These books about the orphelines are short, about a hundred pages each with large print and lovely illustrations in this particular volume by Adriana Saviozzi. Both the story and the reading level are appropriate for beginning chapter book readers, ages six to ten or so. The children in the book are quite mischievous and sometimes naughty, but they learn and grow. If children were about to join a scouting-type group such as Trail Life or American Heritage Girls, this book would be a good introduction to the concept of scouting.
Other books in the series about the Orphelines include:
- The Happy Orpheline
- A Brother for the Orphelines
- A Pet for the Orphelines
- A Grandmother for the Orphelines
The Orphelines in the Enchanted Castle is Book 4 in the Orphelines series of five books total. The other volumes in the series are similar to this in terms of reading level and interest level, but they have various other illustrators, such as Garth Williams, Fermin Rocker, and David White. I like the simple and vivid drawings in Enchanted Castle best, I think, although Garth Williams is always good. This book is another entry in the Books of 1964 Project.