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Six brothers is a lot! It’s difficult to make them stand out in the reader’s mind as distinct characters, even when the book is a hefty 464 pages.

Unfortunately, I think Lim was somewhat hobbled by the story she chose to follow.

Shiori had always dreaded the marriage, but she finds herself falling for Takkan, even though he doesn’t know her identity. She also meets Takkan, the northern boy to whom she was once betrothed. As she pursues an end to the curse, Shiori makes new friends and enemies. Here, she must turn them into a net to capture the dragon’s pearl that belongs to her stepmother. Like Andersen’s princess, Shiori must weave the painful, magical nettles she collects. Her castle no longer safe, Shiori goes north to seek her brothers and find a way to break the curse. (The book has a beautiful cover, but I almost wish the artist had committed to including the bowl-hat that shades Shiori’s face for most of the story.) I was half right-the girl-with-bowl-on-head story seems to come from Japanese folklore. The detail is so wonderfully strange that I was sure it was lifted straight from the Andersen fairy tale. A large bowl is magicked onto her head as a hat, hiding her eyes from the people she meets, although she can see through it. The final element of Shiori’s curse is the most bizarre. Her magic has been taken from her, and every word she speaks will mean the death of one brother. All that changes the day she learns of her stepmother’s magic and her brothers are turned into cranes. Trained by a dragon prince she meets by the water, Shiori keeps her magic secret even from her beloved brothers. The nettle-weaving heroine is their sister Shiori, a headstrong princess with a secret gift for magic, which is forbidden in her kingdom of Kiata. Here, Lim’s six princes are transformed into magnificent red-crowned cranes by their stepmother, a sorceress with a dragon pearl hidden in her heart. Alternate versions of this story from the Brothers Grimm and others vary the number of brothers and type of bird.

She does this by taking a vow of silence and weaving shirts of nettles that will transform her brothers back. In Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Wild Swans,” a wicked queen transforms her husband’s sons into swans, leaving their sister to break the curse.