Bad Princess: True Tales from Behind the Tiara

The cover looks exciting: True Tales from Behind the Tiara! You think it’s going to be fun to read, but the author tells you that life could be hard for princesses–they might have to marry someone they don’t like for the good of the kingdom. It’s called a KINGdom, isn’t it? There is no princessdom! The book gets better when telling stories about medieval royalty or the Borgia pope, but then it gets boring again at the end, when the author compares fairy tales to Disney and Princess Diana. Some of the stories are pretty disgusting. For instance, Elizabeth Bathory, a Slovakian countess, was walled into a room in her castle after being accused of bathing in girls’ blood. This book is not for fourth-graders like me! Older kids, maybe even in high school like my brother (who would never read a book about princesses), will probably get the jokes that made my mom laugh but I didn’t think were funny. Diana Spencer once said that being a princess would be fun “like Anne Boleyn,” but if she had read this book first, she would remember that Henry VIII killed most of his wives, Anne Boleyn included. The book ends with a new princess rule: “A princess can change the world.”