When a young prince inadvertently allows his three sisters to be abducted, he is banished from the kingdom, wandering the world until he meets up with each of them again. Learning of the various enchantments that bind their husbands, the prince vows to find the Sun Princess, who alone can free them from their bondage. At first a prisoner in her palace, the prince and the Sun Princess fall in love, only to be parted when the prince's curiosity frees a terrible giant, who then kidnaps his beloved. Now a new quest lies before him...

This detailed retelling of a Lithuanian folk epic was fascinating, if somewhat uneven. Perhaps it is a weakness in the translation, The Sun Princess and Her Deliverer being printed by the Moscow-based Progress Publishers, but the sequence of events was not always clear to me. The prince's three sisters are supposedly kidnapped by a dragon, but no mention is made of their abductor when he meets up with them again years later. He seeks the Sun Princess in order to free his brothers-in-law, but his quest is utterly forgotten, until the very end of the story.

But despite these inconsistencies, I enjoyed both the story and the stylized illustrations by A. Makunaite. There are many references here to ancient Lithuanian mythology, from the witch Laume, to the Sun Princess herself, who is clearly meant to represent the goddess Saule. In fascinating contrast to the more patriarchal Greek norms, which assigned masculinity to the sun (Apollo), and femininity to the moon (Artemis), the Lithuanian pantheon included a sun goddess (Saule), and a moon god (Menulis). Well worth the time, for anyone interested in Lithuanian or Baltic folklore, though how the reader might obtain a copy, is another question altogether. ( )