In GOOSE CHASE the heroine is Alexandria, a goose girl turned “enchanted” maiden whose hair rains gold dust and whose tears turn to diamonds. Due to her new gifts, she is being courted, if being kept in a tower and pressured to marry can be called courting, by both a king and a prince. With the help of her flock of a dozen geese, she escapes the tower only to embark upon a series of adventures in her quest to remain unmarried. Eventually the prince becomes her ally and co-conspirator in plots to avoid the king.

Kindl uses first person narration and frequent dialogue to establish Alexandria’s character. Something about her spunk makes her all the more believable. Connie Tyrrell Burns, writing for School Library Journal says, “Alexandria is a witty, feisty, no-nonsense feminist, and her tale is told with tongue in cheek and lots of laugh-out-loud humor.” Upset with the disruption of her normal life by her “gifts”, Alexandria quips, “In the future I shall know precisely what to do if another old beggar woman comes pestering me for a bite to eat while I’m herding my Geese in the high meadow. Will I give her my last crust of bread, like the softhearted, simpleminded dunderpate that I am? No I will not; I’ll send her away with a flea in her ear, that’s what I’ll do.” Although Alexandria’s voice is mostly amusing, Kindl’s use of “old fashioned” words can sometimes go overboard. On one page we read the words nay, verily, mayhap, denned, perchance, slumbered, ‘twas, overmuch, nary, and naught. It is not very frequently that this overuse stands out, but when it does it seems to disrupt the flow of the reading.

Throughout the story, Alexandria comes to realize that the prince might not be as stupid as she thought. In what can be an amusing or contradicting end statement, depending on how you look at it, she says, “I half turned to look at King Edmund following in our train. Mayhap, I mused, I would have to finish that last stitch on my wedding gown one of these days, after all.” Although there is no marriage in the book, it does seem to go against her fiercely independent spirit. On the other hand, Alexandria has changed and matured through the course of her adventures and perhaps sees the value of companionship.

Fans of fairy tale fantasy will enjoy Alexandria and her trials and tribulations. Kindl borrows from many familiar tales in a way that makes it her own.

Burns, Connie Tyrrell. 2001. Review of Goose Chase in School Library Journal.