Although I didn’t connect strongly with this book, I did enjoy meeting Mette, a friendly young mother who reads and writes all the time when she isn't spending time with her family. That meeting was at Orson Scott Card’s writing boot camp in Orem, Utah, in the summer of 2002.
I suspect that the title of this book is a nod to one of my favorite Card stories, also called “The Princess and the Bear,” although there is no other connection between the two stories.