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Cimorene is a princess who gets bored with all the proper things she is supposed to learn (etiquette, sewing, and the like), and keeps finding more interesting things to do-- like fencing lessons, learning magic, or even how to cook-- but her more interesting lessons are always halted as soon as her parents find out. Despairing over what to do with her, they decide to marry her off to a prince in a neighboring kingdom. When Cimorene figures this out, she decides to run away-- and with a helpful tip from a talking frog, she finds some dragons and volunteers to be a dragon's princess-- which is quite "proper," since it happens to princesses all the time, and much more interesting for Cimorene.

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Charmain is volunteered by her aunt Sempronia to watch her great-uncle William's house while he is away for health reasons. William is a magician, and both he and Sempronia assume that Charmain has basic knowledge of magical things-- but she doesn't, because her mother doesn't think it is nice or proper to learn such things. Charmain is excited about it only because she thinks it will give her more uninterrupted time to read books. The house is a magical one-- it seems to have only two rooms, but if you go through the door to the kitchen and turn just as you go through, you find yourself in a long hallway with the study and several bedrooms, and a window that lets out onto a meadow-- and that is just one of the simpler of the "many ways" of this house. Charmain finds herself adopted by a dog named Waif, and becomes friends with Peter, who has come to be an apprentice to her uncle; Peter is a bumbling magician, but has much more practical knowledge than Charmain herself, who doesn't know how to do laundry or dishes.

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