Tom Burns, father of a princess-crazy little girl, suggests bedtime reading that will make both dad and daughter happy.
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It’s a sad fact, but, if you’re the parent of a young girl, at some point, there’s a better than average chance that you’ll have to deal with the creeping horror that is the princess book genre. The princess craze is an amazing thing to behold. It’s like an airborne pathogen or some kind of morphic field cultural memory download. It just worms your way into your child’s subconscious with no obvious point of entry. Even if your daughter is the most tomboyish tomboy on the block, eventually, there’s like a 90% chance that you’re going to have to buy her a princess dress and a cringe-inducing selection of princess-themed reading material at some point. (No parent should have to read their child a book this pink at bedtime.)
And, trust me, resistance is futile. I’ve spent countless hours already trying to shape my daughter into a gender-proud feminist (and she’s FIVE) and yet there I was – taking her to a Disney Princess breakfast at EPCOT (by myself!) and making sure that we saw every damn princess in that park. Why? Because she simply loves princesses and fighting against their appeal is just going to make me the common enemy of both my daughter and the princess industrial complex. And I won’t survive if they unite to take me down.
So, how do I fight back? I mostly do it through books. I am still a MAJOR gatekeeper when it comes to my daughter’s reading material, so, at the moment, I do have the ability to keep her away from cheap throwaway titles like Barbie: The Princess Shoe Party Fashion Show and Cinderella: A Sparkly Royal Thanksgiving… which are EVERYWHERE and are just as soul-crushing as they sound. While I hide those titles behind the periodicals at the local library, I spend a good deal of time searching for really engaging princess stories that I then subtly push her way.
And that’s a challenge. It’s not easy finding princess books where the princesses aren’t passive, aren’t beholden to a prince, and have lives and agendas of their own. And, on the flip side, I also don’t want to give my daughter really hacky, didactic propaganda pieces where the author is just out to scream, “AND THE PRINCESS COULD DO ANYTHING THE PRINCE COULD DO! AND PROBABLY BETTER!” (If I could find the video of 30 Rock‘s Liz Lemon as her high-school football place kicker, missing an easy kick and cheering “Equality!”, I’d put it here.) Even if I agree with the message, if it’s not a well-told story, forget about it.
As a service to you parents out there who may have children suffering from princess mania or who just simply can’t face down another royal Disney bedtime, here are six really impressive princess books that your kids will enjoy and that won’t make you curl your fists in post-feminist rage.
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The Princess and the Pizza
by Mary Jane and Herm Auch
This is an extremely fun title – particularly if your child is already familiar with the normal Disney princess canon. Princess Paulina is struggling with peasant life now that her father, the king, has given up his throne to become a wood-carver. So, when she hears that Prince Drupert is seeking a wife, she hurries over to “get back to princessing” and finds herself in a competition against other potential princesses to be his bride. The humor in Princess and the Pizza is really irreverent and clever – it reminds me a lot ofShelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre – particularly as Princess Paulina realizes how ridiculous the competition is. She’s competing against nicely exaggerated versions of classic princesses like Snow White and Rapunzel and, after a cooking competition where Paulina accidentally invents pizza, the book ends with a great twist – Paulina sees the value in what she’s created, tells Drupert to shove it, and opens a successful pizza joint. This is a very silly take on the whole notion of princessing, but Paulina is such an expansive, resourceful character that your princess-jonesing kids will love her. (Age range: 3 and up. It’s more of a storybook than a picture book, so there’s a fair bit of text on its 32 pages.)
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Princess Hyacinth (The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated)
by Florence Parry Heide, illustrated by Lane Smith
Readers of this blog won’t be surprised at all to hear me praising a book byFlorence Parry Heide and Lane Smith, but, all of my preferences and biases aside,Princess Hyacinth is one of the best books either of them has ever done. (I will one day write a much, much longer appraisal of Princess Hyacinthfor the blog, but I couldn’t leave it off this list.) The concept is elegantly absurd – there was a princess with a problem. She floats. She can’t stop herself from floating into the air at any time. And, around that premise, Heide and Smith craft a story that just feels fresh and unique – you’ve never read a princess book like this before. Hyacinth is annoyed that she can’t play outside with the other kids (particularly with Boy, the young man she has a crush on), but she also longs to take full advantage of her unique condition and soar among the clouds. After a close call where she almost floats away into the stratosphere, Hyacinth becomes much more comfortable with who she is and decides to stop fighting against her problem and learn to enjoy it.
Smith delivers some of the best work of his career here, but, for me, it’s Heide’s prose that really makes Princess Hyacinth a classic. Her text reads like it was mined directly out of the mind of a kid, like the smartest seven-year-old in the world is telling you the greatest story she’s ever heard and, in my experience, kids eat that up. They can’t get enough of it. In my mind, the closing words of the book say it all: “The problem about the floating was never solved, and that’s too bad. But Princess Hyacinth was never bored again. GOOD.” Yes, it is. (Age range: 3 and up. There’s more text than some picture books, but it’s fairly large and fun to read.)
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Princess Pigsty
by Cornelia Funke, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer
Cornelia Funke is a prolific and popular German author, best known for herInkheart novels (they made them into a movie), but I fell in love with her thanks to her picture books, which are, frankly, amazing. Honestly. If you have kids – PARTICULARLY if you have girls – go out right now to a library or bookstore and get every picture book that Funke has ever done with Kerstin Meyer. They’re FANTASTIC. In their picture books like Pirate Girl or The Wildest Brother, the lead characters are always children who just really, really seem like children, which is, actually, a very hard thing for an author to pull off. Funke’s characters are astoundingly well-developed and she creates these wonderful little fables in which all of the details and story moments are disarmingly human and believable (and fun to read). Princess Pigsty is all about a princess who is sick of being sheltered. Princess Isabella hates being waited on, hates sitting around and doing nothing, so she tosses out her crown and declares that she wants to get “dirty”. Her father, the king, punishes her by forcing her to work in the kitchen and the pigsty, but it backfires when Isabella realizes that she LOVES camping out in the pigsty, loves doing things for herself, loves the satisfaction of working, and loves being self-reliant.
That’s a very cool message for kids, but, actually, my favorite moments in Princess Pigsty
are towards the end, when the king invites Isabella to come back to the castle – not because she’s proven him to be a fool, but mostly because he misses her. And, while Isabella opts to stay in the pigpen, she does come back to visit and even recovers her crown, which seems like a definite gesture to make peace with her dad. I don’t know why, but that ending just kills me. I love that the characters don’t act like operatic buffoons. Yes, he’s a king, but he’s also a dad and he loves his daughter and actually admits that he was wrong – and parents just don’t do that in picture books that often. And Isabella, in turn, adjusts her behavior because even she realizes that she’s been less diplomatic than she should. Those moments, the moments where fairy tale characters act like real living breathing people, are why I’ve got such a dad-crush on Cornelia Funke and why TWO of her books made this list. (Keep reading.) (Age range: 3 and up. Kindergarteners and first-graders will LOVE this one.)
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The Paper Bag Princess (Classic Munsch)
by Robert Munsch, illustrated by Michael Martchenko
Most stories would end here, but the real kicker of The Paper-Bag Princess comes after Ronald is rescued and the snotty prince tells Elizabeth, “You smell like ashes, your hair is all tangled and you are wearing a dirty old paper bag. Come back when you are dressed like a real princess.” (Oh snap.) What does Elizabeth do? She kicks the jerk to the curb, which is almost an even better lesson for young readers than having her slay a dragon. The story is all about this frilly princess having expectations of what the world is like and, when faced with reality, having to adjust and move forward. She won’t let a dragon get away with wrecking her castle and she won’t marry a creep who can’t even be grateful for being rescued, which, again, is a fantastic lesson for young girls. (Age range: 3 and up.)
5. The Secret Lives of Princesses, by Philippe Lechermeier, illustrated by Rebecca Dautremer
What a cool, unusual book. I will fully admit that this picture book – which is really more of a coffee table book (and you know how I love coffee table books) – is definitely too old for my five-year-old daughter. There isn’t any objectionable subject matter, but the writing level is a bit over her head and it’s an incredibly dense book for young kids. That being said,The Secret Lives of Princesses is possibly the most visually arresting princess book that I’ve ever seen and my daughter does love flipping through the pages and marveling at the beautiful artwork. And the text is pretty fantastic as well. Lechermeier has created this extremely unique catalog of different kinds of princesses and none of them are the traditional damsel-in-distress sort.
There’s Princess Paige, the librarian; Princess Primandproper, with the permanently pinched face; and, beyond the wordplay (and the book is packed TIGHT with wordplay), you’ll find unusual princesses from all over the world. That fact alone makes this an essential princess read because finding a book that actually includes African princesses, Native American princesses, Indian princesses, Latina princesses, and Asian princesses, standing aside their Anglo-Saxon cousins, is next to impossible. Yes, this is more of a coffee table art book than a storybook and, no, I can’t actually imagine sitting down and reading this to my kid back to front. BUT I do love leaving this one out on her bookshelf for her to discover and watching as she pages through the strange and beautiful variety of princesses that the world has to offer. (Age range: 7 and up – however, much, much younger children will have fun leafing through the pages and marveling at the paintings.)
6. The Princess Knight by Cornelia Funke, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer
This is the second Funke/Meyer book on this list and it’s another great one, especially if you have a daughter who’s ever been forced to sit on the sidelines while the young boys around her go at it with toy swords and lightsabers. That’s the experience that Princess Violetta has suffered through in The Princess Knight – her mother died in childbirth, so her father, King Wilfred the Worthy, has raised Violetta in the same way that he raised his other three sons, encouraging them all to swordfight, wrestle, and behave like princes. Since Violetta was smaller, she spends most of her childhood being bowled over, until, after years of training and learning to be smarter, more aware, and more clever than her siblings, Violetta starts to prove herself as a skilled fighter. However, since she’s a princess and he has no idea what else to do with her, her father holds a jousting tournament to marry off Violetta – a fact that appalls Violetta to such a degree that she enters the contest in disguise to win her own hand in marriage.
This is an incredibly engaging female empowerment tale that, again, in Funke’s trademark style, is extremely human and relatable. Violetta’s father isn’t a bad man, but he’s grief-stricken and clueless about raising a girl, so, even when he makes a bad decision, it’s fairly obvious that he’s not some cartoonish oaf oppressing his daughter. He’s just a confused dad who made a mistake and, as a constantly confused dad myself, I love seeing more of us good-natured screw-ups turning up in fairy tales. If your daughter has ever picked up a lightsaber and showed her brother that girls can hit just as hard as boys, you need to pick up The Princess Knight. (Age range: 3 and up. But, just be aware that the book does open with the death of Violetta’s mother – there’s a beautiful illustration of her father mourning his wife – so, if your child is particularly sensitive about death, you might want to either skip this, warn them, or tread lightly.)
Originally appeared at Building a Library
Also read: 25 Failsafe* Rules for Dads Raising Daughters
Lead photo from This is what Real Fatherhood Looks Like
It’s going to be finish of mine day, but before finish I am reading this
great paragraph to increase my experience.
You missed CinderEdna! I adored that book as a child. The illustrations are stunning and the story is a true winner.
How about recommendations of feminist books for little boys who are obsessed with cars??
These books look awesome. Thanks 🙂
Falling for Rapunzel. it is hilarious.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0142403997
You could also try Princess Smartypants by Babette Cole.
http://www.amazon.com/Princess-Smartypants-Babette-Cole/dp/0698115554/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1381731803&sr=1-1&keywords=princess+smartypants
If you’re looking for similar things for older readers (though I remember reading them in 2nd grade – I always read above my level) the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C Wrede are about Princess Cimorene who gets fed up with Princessing and runs away to be a dragon’s princess. She ends up with the title of Chief Cook and Bottle Washer, and does end up marrying a king on her own terms. I’d thoroughly recommend them!
Very interesting to read your blurb about princess Hyacinth – I have encountered that storyline before in the works of Graham McDonald – Scottish (I think) fantasy writer of some really engaging works. He wrote in the 19th century. I wonder where he pulled the inspiration from
Great list – thanks for sharing that, I am looking them up now (as a mum of a princess obsessed 6y/o). Another favourite of ours is “the Knight who took all day” – about a knight who takes so long getting ready to fight the dragon that by the time he’s ready, the princess has gone out and done him out of a job.
As someone who is about to go read all of the books on this list that I haven’t yet read, I’d also like to suggest a princess story that I adored growing up. It’s a picture book called Cinder Edna, written by Ellen Jackson and illustrated by Kevin O’Malley. Cinder Edna and Cinder Ella are next door neighbors, and Cinder Ella’s story is the standard one you’d expect (she marries the older brother prince). Cinder Edna, on the other hand, rescues herself. (She gets a part time job to pay for a new dress, takes the bus to the ball,… Read more »
Perhaps this book is out of the age range, but The Ordinary Princess was my favorite book when I was in the fifth grade, and I read it to my daughter who is in the 2nd grade. Great list, thank you!
When I was a little girl I had more of an interest in mermaids than princesses. (Which is odd, considering that to this day I have never learned to swim.) I loved fairy tales of all kinds, though, many of which involved princesses. I was lucky enough to have a mother who had a lot of time to read to me and I think that many of the books we read together were probably a bit over my age level but I enjoyed them anyway. My mother was pretty lenient about reading stories that were not completely sugar-coated and sanitized… Read more »
I have written a musical comedy version (for kids aged 4-8) of The 12 Dancing Princesses, renamed “Gabriel, the Stargazer,” in which the princess bucks authority (in a child-friendly way!) and actively chooses her husband. It’s part of an audio album called “Fairy Tales & Silly Songs,” available on CDBaby and iTunes (and others sites). The other fairy tale musical plays are “The Frog Prince” and “Sisters,” inspired by Perrault’s tale, Diamonds & Toads. In all my tales, the characters, male and female, become more self-aware through courage. These are not a bit preachy, though; they are cute and funny.… Read more »
Nice list! But why all the hate on an interest in “princess” things? I’ve been reading several articles on GMP for the past few days that seem to insist that a little girl’s interest in pink, princess stuff or tea parties is somehow “wrong” or “passive”. I kind of feel like we are baiscally saying that little boys “play right” and little girls don’t. Maybe I’m reading it wrong but that is how it seems to me. Of course there is nothing wrong if a girl wants to play more stereotypical boy games. Hopefully she does at least sometimes so… Read more »
Thank you so much for this post. I sometimes feel like a lone soldier in the anti-princess battle. My daughter came home from school with The Paper-Bag Princess last week and I was all but shocked, pleasantly. The Secret Lives of Princesses has just gone directly into my shopping cart. Score one for the good-guys (and girls).
Princesses Are Not Quitters was read and re-read (and re-read, and….) many times in our household. Fantastic tale of three princeses who swap places with the castle staff. http://www.amazon.com/Princesses-Are-Not-Quitters-Kate/dp/1582349878
Please, please put The Ordinary Princess on your list. It’s exquisite. I loved it when I was the little girl who never saw herself in the fairy tales or girl-heroine stories, because I wasn’t (am still not) a blonde. I still love it and will buy it for my daughter. My (beautiful blond) sister has bought it for her (beaitufil blond) daughter. It’s not shrill and preachy. It’s not an inoculation against girlygirlyplasticprincess junk. It’s a story that makes you fall in love with being normal. Being a regular kid. And finding something amazing and valuable and even unique about… Read more »
My girls love Usborne’s Princess Ellie series about a pony mad princess. And Princess Merida in Brave who’s a free-spirited, adventurous, archery-loving tom boy!
I have nothing substantive to add on the topic. I just want one more comment added in order support this kind of article, because THIS kind of article is a good example of what GMP does at its best. It’s useful and concrete and uses appropriate language and makes plausible recommendations. I enjoyed reading it just for its tone and utility, and I don’t even have a daughter.
More articles like this, please! I don’t even care what they’re about as long as they’re like this!
Ella Enchanted is a GREAT book for this, and also Wise Women: Folk and Fairy Tales from Around the World 🙂 Thank you so much for sharing.
Also
The Princess Diaries
I don’t know if it’s available in English, but there’s a DEFA adaptation of the frog prince where that HORRIBLE, spoilt, princess isn’t rewarded for attempting to murder an innocent frog: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0093052/
Have you seen this?!? It’s my new alternative princess bible – a guide to independent princesses! http://www.amightygirl.com/mighty-girl-picks/independent-princess
If you have daughters, A Mighty Girl is an ESSENTIAL site to follow. I absolutely adore it. Their picks are always intelligent and amazing. I can’t say enough good things about them – http://www.amightygirl.com
I LOVE A Mighty Girl! I actually shared this article on their Facebook fan page.
We cited them in our megahit list 25 Failsafe* Rules for Dads Raising Daughters, which you can see here:
https://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/25-failsafe-rules-for-dads-raising-daughters/
Also,
Do Princesses Really Kiss Frogs?
Do Princesses Wear Hiking Boots?
Fun and cute…..
Paper Bag Princess is one of our favorites. Guess I’ll have to check out the others,too.
And OF COURSE Wonder Woman.
Having two boys, we were lucky to miss the princess problem. Instead we had dinosaurs. Never want to see another one.
I found that my girls liked reading the dinosaur books much more than the Princessy books. Now that my two youngest are boys I’m finding a whole new bunch of books about dinosaurs or dragons that feature a female character. Really wish those had been around to read to my girls!