Overruled! My Rules for Being a Pretty Princess by Heath McKenzie

"MORE THAN ANYTHING IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, I WANT TO BE A PRETTY PRINCESS."

No sooner has the girl in the lavender tutu finished her wish than, without even a POOF! or a Bibbibety-Boppety--Boo, a pretty princess in a fluffy white dress appears before her and asks if she really, really wants princess training.

"GASP! Oh, I DO!"

In no time the princess wannabe finds herself being laced in to wasp-waisted white gown. Now she's gasping for real!

Her hair is done up in a tiara-friendly beehive and she's slathered with makeup.

"BUT I LOOK A BIT BOR---"

No time for girl-talk. It's tea time for pretty princesses. Whispering that the rules for pretty princesses require that they don't get their gowns dirty and that they don't actually eat any of the goodies on the tea table, and that they certainly don't boogie down with the music, her royal mentor tells her what all of this is REALLY all about.

"NOW WE MUST WAIT FOR... OUR PRINCES."

They wait... and wait... and wait... and wait.

YAWN!

A handsome prince arrives, along with an overdressed, freckle-faced princeling who sticks out his tongue at his presumed "princess bride."

Our princess apprentice suddenly knows more than she ever wanted to know about being a princess.

In her first and last royal decree, our girl over-rules the rules, especially that deal-killing last one--

WAIT FOR A HANDSOME PRINCE.

Herth McKenzie's My Rules for Being a Pretty Princess (Sourcebook/Jabberwocky, 2015) has a lot of fun with the down-side of princessing, with plenty of visual humor in the double-page spread in which the two bored princesses try to stay PERFECT while they wait for their royal suitors to show up.

Pair this reluctant royal with Carmen LaVigna Coyle's Do Princesses Wear Hiking Boots?

Princess on the Edge: Dangerously Ever After by Daska Slater

PRINCESS AMANITA LOVED THINGS THAT WERE DANGEROUS.

Amanita is not your mother’s fair princess. She adores her pet scorpion and has a ponytail to match his be-stingered tail. Her bike has no brakes, just to make the ride a little more–-stimulating, and her favorite fun is walking blindfolded around the wall on the edge of the moat.

But her special princessly pleasure is her garden. It has just the right stuff for a princess who loves peril:

PRICKLES AND STICKLES AND BRAMBLES AND NETTLES!”

But when mild-mannered Prince Florian comes calling for a courtly walk in the garden, he politely plucks a bunch of Amanita’s gorgeous “grenapes”–-grapes which explode like grenades when picked. To make amends for this faux pas, he sends her a dozen long-stemmed pink roses and an apologetic note.

Amanita spurns the sweet smelling roses. (Her garden posies stink like limburger cheese, and her heckleberries heckle passers by with insults.) But then she notices the impressive thorns on the stems. Ouch! But for Amanita thorns are a feature, not a bug, and she quickly ensconces them in a vase, upside down to display this fine quality! This prickly princess must have some of these for her garden of deadly delights, so she quickly dashes off a note to Florian’s gardener, who misreads her request for “rose seeds” for nose seeds and sends a plant that produces a bunch of weird-looking NOSES instead of pink blossoms.

At first, Amanita finds the proboscis plants amusing, but when they keep her awake all night with ceaseless sniffing, sneezing, and snoring, something must be done! With ire in her eyes, she stomps off to return Florian’s, er, smelly bouquet.

WHAT DO THEY DO?” HE ASKED.

“THEY SMELL GOOD.” THE PRINCESS SAID.

“I MEAN, THEY SMELL WELL!

ANYWAY, THEY’RE GOOD AT SMELLING.”

In Dashka Slater’s latest, Dangerously Ever After (Penguin Group, 2012), this anti-princess’s misadventures, as appropriately portrayed by illustrator Valerie Docampo, offers some hilarity and not a little playful wordplay for older primary students who appreciate a sophisticated princess who walks on the wild and woolly side now and again. Pair this one with Ian Falconer’s Olivia and the Fairy Princesses (see review here) for readers who enjoy a brace of offbeat persnickety princess tales.

No Place Like Gnome(ville): The Monster Princess: by D. J. MacHale

Down, down, down, in places below,
Caves can be found where krinkle nuts grow.

This world full of monsters is quiet and gloomy.
It’s dark. It’s spooky. It’s not very roomy.

The creatures who dwell there are called rugabees.
They dig up the krinkles and fight off the fleas.

The best krinkle-digger was Lala, by far.
So fast, so brave, a rugabee star.

But Lala is an dissatisfied rugabee. She loves to sing and craves to wear beautiful gowns and dance at brilliantly lighted balls. But as there’s zero chance of that underground, Lala takes her aspirations topside, giving the three lovely princesses dwelling in the castle above quite a start.

The precious princesses don’t mince their words. “You’re stinky!” they cry as they catch her trying on their fancy gowns. But Lala begs for a chance, and the princesses soon adopt her as their monster mascot make-over project. Scrubbed and scented, coiffed and decked out in a gown which compliments (well, sort of) her green hair and murky complexion, she is ready to be smuggled into the ball.

When she entered the ball
It was perfect and bright.
But the ending was not
To be happy that night.

It seems that the pretty princesses neglected that all important mani and pedi, and Lala’s claws, so well adapted to digging krinkle nuts, wreak havoc with her silken finery. The impostor is exposed as a princess pretender, and the pretty princesses turn on her like the clique they are and order her out. Lala flees down, down, down to her underground refuge, doomed, she thinks, to be “forever a troll.”

But alas, Lala realizes that she’s still wearing the princesses’ tattered gown, and like the honest rugabee she is, she determines to return above ground to return it to its owners. But there she finds the princesses in extremis, about to become princess-flavored appetizers for a ravening beast:

She saw the three princesses huddled in fear.
Trapped by a Weevil who grinned ear to ear.
“MY! I’M HUNGRY TODAY FOR SWEET PRINCESS PIE!” it gloated.

And Lala, the champion krinkle-digger, just happens to have the right nutty snack along to divert the beast’s attention and save the pretty princesses from becoming the hors d’oeuvers du jour. All’s well that ends well, and Lala comes to the conclusion that digging krinkle nuts underground is her true calling and joyfully joins her family down under once more.

Here D. J. MacHale wryly reworks the perennial teen plot in which a clique of "popular girls" adopts some plain Jane and teaches her to walk and talk like a "Pop," until their made-over model fails to pass her popularity final at the prom. When the in-crowd sees through her pretense, the populars turn on their own creation--at which time the poor girl discovers who her "real" friends are. Ably abetted by Alexandra Boiger’s appropriately earthy palette, MacHale’s The Monster Princess (Aladdin, 2010) is a timely little takeoff on that ever-popular princess wannabe genre, with a pleasant “there’s-no-place-like-home (when you are a gnome)” conclusion, especially suited for the scary season.