libxml++

I have been looking into some XML parsers for my little dbooks project. But to be honest they are all shit. Xerces is just too big. I really don't need DTD's for a little XML file. Then you have the little ones like TinyXML that has the right idea but how it is done is simply dreadfull. Some others parsers are libxml++ which uses gtkmm so I need to ship gnome with a 24K program, brilliant. And if you have a '£' in your XML you get a:
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'Glib::ConvertError'
Why isn't there a little cpp file I can include, pass it a string or char* and give it the node I want and it will retrurn me a string vector or char array[]* of the values. Something like

parse(string xmlStuff);
getValues("Author");

This would make my life so much easier.