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The Princess and the Prom

© Elizabeth Churchwell

THE PRINCESS AND THE PROM
A review The Princess Diaries latest installment, Princess in Pink

If you've never met fourteen-year-old Mia Thermopolis, here are some things you might not know about her:

1. Her dad's the prince of Genovia, so that makes her--you guessed it--a princess, complete with her own tiara. Which isn't so bad, except . . .
2. She has to partake in princess lessons every day after school with her grandmere, the dowager princess of Genovia. But other than the princess thing (and the lessons that come with) everything seems to be okay. Well, with just one exception:
3. Her mom just married her Algebra teacher, Mr. G, and now Mia has a baby brother or sister on the way.

If you think that's a lot for a teenage girl/princess-in-training to cope with, consider this: Her best friend Lilly was just caught making out in a coat closet with someone very much not her boyfriend, while Mia's own boyfriend of five months (Lilly's older brother, Michael) has yet to ask her to his senior prom. Oh, and the whole of New York City has been shut down, thanks to a hairless poodle and a bowl of lobster bisque.

In Princess in Pink--the scrumptious fifth installment of Meg Cabot's Princess Diaries series--high school freshman, and heir to the Genovian throne, Princess Amelia Migonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo (aka Mia) stresses over proms and picket lines, being the newest staffer on the school paper, and her mom's plan for a home birth, while struggling to achieve self-actualization before her fifteenth birthday.

But when an incident at Mia's birthday dinner leaves Jangbu, the bus boy, without a job, protests and strikes erupt all over New York. Now, with the city's entertainment industry in chaos, the question isn't whether Mia gets to go to prom, it's whether there will be a prom at all!

Like the rest of the Princess Diaries books, Princess In Pink reads like the uncensored and unabridged thoughts and neuroses of a teenage girl whose insecurities keep her struggling to find her own identity, while conforming to her new roles as princess, girlfriend, and big sister.

Cabot's tone, which is defiantly juvenile, comes off witty and polished, not delayed or condescending. With a carefully laid-back style, she graces the page as the voice of Mia, our heroine whose romantic ideas of life and love are as unrealistic as the story itself, yet naïvely optimistic.

I you're looking for a book with substance, look elsewhere--Princess in Pink has enough bubblegum fluff to choke an entire army of Kelly Osbornes. But if a light-hearted, fun and frothy read is what you're after, this is the ticket.

The copyright of the article The Princess and the Prom in Young Adult Literature is owned by Elizabeth Churchwell. Permission to republish The Princess and the Prom in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.