Perfecting the Princess? Princess in Training by Tammi Sauer

Dear Viola Louise Hassenfeffer:

Do you want to polish your princess skills? Camp Princess will teach you to wave, walk, and waltz just like royalty should. The day concludes with the Royal Bash.

Enroll now so you can be the darling of your kingdom!

MADAME GERTRUDE
Director, Camp Princess

Little Princess Viola Louise is not performing her princessy duties per expectations. Karate-chopping, moat diving, and drawbridge skateboarding are not prim enough for the King nor proper enough for the Queen.

The princess wants to please, so when the sign-up form for Camp Princess arrives at the castle, she's on it!

What princess wouldn't want to be the darling of the kingdom?

Viola Louise is pretty enough, but when her practice of the royal wave seems a bit pusillanimous, she adds her customary handy karate chop to rev up the movement. NOT kosher for Princess Camp.

The next skill is the Frills of Fashion. In ruffles, flounces, crinolines, and coronets, the princesses hit the drawbridge runway to learn the proper princessy pace. But under tons of petticoats and taffeta, trainee Viola is definitely overheated.

A cooling dive into the moat meets with disapprobation from Madame Gertrude.

Waltzing lessons give Princess Viola a chance to move and groove, but when she throws in some skateboard moves, Madame Gertrude lowers the boom.

As grand finale Royalty Bash begins, Princess Viola is disgraced and contemplating becoming a Princess Camp dropout, when an unexpected visitor crashes the party.

EVERY PRINCESS GASPED.

"BUT--" PRINCESS VIOLA SAID TO MADAME, "THERE'S A BIG GREEN DRAGON BEHIND YOU. AND HE LOOKS HUNGRY!"

And her not-so-prim-and-proper princess practices come in handy as Viola Louise employs her heroic HI-YAAA and other disapproved skills to vanquish the dragon with a resounding THUNK, in Tammi Sauer's Princess in Training (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books).  No dragons were harmed in the production of this book (the dragon is seen to slink out a door, page right) as Princess Viola Louise Hassenfeffer is hailed as the heroine of the day and a darling of all the kingdoms in the countryside.

Joe Berger's illustrations are rowdy and rollicking cartoon fare, and Sauer's not-your-average princess tale fits right into the popular picture book genre of young royals who dare to be different. Little wannabe princesses who have enjoyed Deborah Underwood's Part-time Princess, Julie Andrew's The Very Fairy Princess and sequels, Jane Yolen's Not All Princesses Dress in Pink, Carmina Coyle's Do Princesses Wear Hiking Boots? and Ian Falconer's anti-princess prototype, Olivia and the Fairy Princesses. will find Viola Louise the perfect princess.

For more breaking-the-mold stories from Tammi Sauer, see her unlikely tale of a friendship between shark and minnow, Nugget and Fang: Friends Forever--or Snack Time? (2013) (see review here).

Uneasy Is the Head that Wears the Crown: From the Notebooks of a Middle School Princess by Meg Cabot

Olivia is just your average sixth-grader, average size, brown hair, hazel eyes, determined to avoid demerits from Principal Bushy.

But one day in May things change. A Lot.

No one ever told me, "In middle school Annabelle Jenkins is going to threaten to beat you up by the flagpole for absolutely no reason."

There was no reason that I could think of for Annabelle Jenkins to:

1. Knock my organizer from my arms.
2. Shove me.
3. Ask me if I think I'm so great.
4. Call me a princess.

After school Annabelle waylays Olivia and best friend Nishi scuttling for the bus, and Olivia hears something unbelievable. Annabelle is broadcasting her news to the gathering crowd.

"I heard my dad talking to her uncle, and the truth is, her dad is actually a prince. The prince of Genovia, to be exact," sneers Annabelle.

And while Olivia is reeling from that remark, Annabelle begins to act on her promise to "kick her butt." She grabs Olivia's braids and starts yanking.

At that moment I heard a woman's voice ring out. And I saw the most amazing sight.

Her Royal Highness, Princes Mia Thermopoulos of Genovia.

And princess-ex-machina, Princess Mia and her bodyguards whisk Olivia and Nishi away in her limousine, flags of Genovia flying on the front fenders, and soon the now Princess Olivia Grace Clarisse Mignonette finds herself in New York City, meeting the dowager princess, her Grandmere Grimaldi, with her own white poodle puppy and a new wardrobe, hearing the whole story of how her deceased mother had insisted that Olivia grow up in a ordinary American family. Suddenly Olivia understand why her aunt and uncle have always treated her somewhat like an unwanted orphan relative and why she had never met her globe-trotting father. A quick trip to the tiny kingdom of Genovia and a happy reunion with her royal father and his family seem like a Disney dream.

But Olivia is not quite done with Annabelle. It seems that her aunt and uncle file a lawsuit, with Annabelle's father as their lawyer, to have her returned to them, not, it appears, because they really want her, but because they need the generous stipend that her father has provided for her care. Even a real princess, it seems, is not immune to a few unhappy endings, and for a while Annabelle has to return to cope with her in-law guardians, Cranbrook Middle School and its demerits, and the tender mercies of the jealous Annabelle Jenkins.

But with a brave and strong princess like Mia Thermopolis on her side, Olivia Grace Clarisse Mignonette is sure to find her way to a pro tem happy ending, in Meg Cabot's spin-off of her best-selling books-to-movies The Princess Diaries series, her brand-new From the Notebooks of a Middle School Princess (Feiwell and Friends, 2015).

Cabot deftly draws on her skills at spinning a page-turning princess tale filled with equal measures of tasty glimpses of royal privilege and plenty of suspense. Using the familiar first-person diary format, Cabot gives Olivia an engaging persona, and her well-executed blackline illustrations add to the tale-telling, leaving the reader longing for the next chapter in Olivia's story. While not exactly the dreadful Dursleys, Olivia's distant aunt and uncle are the perfect foils for the new princess' adoring royal family, and Annabelle, the mega-popular, mean girl wannabe, is an appropriately disagreeable villain.

Fluffy fantasy fun, just right for summertime reading when a girl is feeling a little bit like the unloved stepchild, Cabot's tale has got a light touch and the improbable events button pushed all the way in this one, as Olivia Grace's nemesis Annabelle gets put in her place and the stage is set for a sequel with Olivia and her BFF Nishi as junior bridesmaids in the royal wedding of her sister, Princess Mia Grimaldi, in the picturesque, pint-sized principality of Genovia.

Even middle-schoolers who once imagined themselves princesses can sometimes to be snatched away to a fairy-tale life, right? And a girl can dream, can't she? (or at least read about a dream come true!)