The princess ends up much better off at the end

I’d heard of this in a few places, so I was glad to get the chance to actually read it.  This children’s book is very cute with a bit of a twist at the end.

We start off with a princess getting to marry a prince.  They both have very fancy clothes and are very proper. Then, a dragon comes and burns the princess’s castle down and takes the prince with him.  All of the princess’s belongings burned, and the only thing she can find to possibly wear is a paper bag, which she makes fairly fashionable. So the princess goes off to rescue her prince.

Now, this is not a nice dragon, as I was expecting.  He’s still a mean and ferocious (and very vain) dragon.  But the princess manages to defeat the dragon, as expected, and rescues the prince.  But defeating a dragon need only last a moment, and rescuing the prince only means letting him out of the dragon’s cave.  These are both temporary states.

The princess learns things on her quest.  She learns that she can be more than just a pretty princess.  She can be clever and make good decisions. She could rule a people, if she wanted.  (She would be a far better ruler than the prince, that’s for sure.) She can do things for herself.  She also sees the perils of vanity, and sees that the handsome prince is no good for her. He has not learned her lessons, and is shallow and conceited.  If the genders had been reversed, and the vain princess was being rescued, the prince may very well have married her anyway. Vanity is almost expected in beautiful princesses, or at least more accepted.  But our princess is smarter than that, and is far more blunt to the prince than most likely anyone has ever been to him in his life. And maybe the prince will get what’s coming to him, in the end. This is a children’s book, after all…

This fulfills the CBR10 Bingo square of “Listicles.”  This was on a Buzzfeed list of “The Best Books to Give as Gifts”