Sham Princess

Two orphaned children, Bert and his sister Prin, live in squalor. Prin is dying of measles and a mysterious illness called brownkitis, wasting away in a dark room while her brother watches. But Prin has spent her short life convinced she is a real princess, and she's gathered trinkets stolen from elsewhere to prove it. Now the truth has surfaced, and the question becomes urgent: will the authorities punish the girl for her deception, or will the rightful owners of those trinkets show mercy to a dying child? Bert must navigate between protecting his sister and facing the consequences of her fantasy. Written in the tradition of Victorian moral tales, Sham Princess asks what we owe to children's imaginations when poverty has left them with nothing else. It's a story about the thin line between harmless fantasy and damaging deception, and whether compassion should ever override honesty.