Time for some chick lit

I’ve been stressed out for some weeks now, and was in desperate need of a fluffy pick-me-up this weekend, so I bumped up Meg Cabot’s Princess On the Brink (Princess Diaries 8) from my TBR heap (book #97 for 2009) — more than two years after I read the 7th book.

The Princess Diaries is Meg Cabot’s bestselling chick lit series about HRH Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo (a.k.a Mia Thermopolis), Princess of Genovia (fondly referred to by her best friend Lilly Moscovitz as POG). As the series title implies, the books read like journal entries chronicling the ups and downs of the life of a teenage girl who also happens to be a princess.

I actually saw the Disney film adaptation years before I read any of the books, and I actually started with Meg Cabot’s All American Girl before I read The Princess Diaries.

Years ago, there was one summer that I was so bored I downloaded a bunch of chicklit novels — including The Princess Diaries — and read so many of them in one go that I ended up dreaming in email exchanges! In 2005 a lot of the Princess Diaries books went on sale everywhere and I ended up buying them one after the other. I stopped at book 7, and then I recently mooched book 8 from Iran so I now have a mismatched collection waiting to be joined by books 9 and 10 someday.

I outgrew the chick lit phase after I got tired of the hit and miss cycle with the dime-a-dozen books that cropped up over the years, although I still occasionally pick one up when I’m in the mood for a light and fluffy read. Meg Cabot (like Sophie Kinsella) is a good old standby, and I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of her  books — I have a shelf full of them, including a signed first edition of The Queen of Babble in the Big City! — except for the paranormal stuff because, well, I really don’t like that genre, and so I don’t have her Mediator series or her 1-800-Where-R-U series.

I like the Princess Diaries (and most of Meg Cabot’s novels, especially Every Boy’s Got One, The Boy Next Door, and All-American Girl) because she experiments with a different way of piecing a story together, bringing on a modern form of the epistolary technique. I like how she tells the stories using various kinds of documents – journal entries, emails, class schedules, songs, poems, schoolbooks, IM transcripts, SMS exchanges, scripts, passed notes, and even receipts! I like it because it makes you feel like you’re not reading when you actually are, and before you know it you’ve already read the whole book, and you feel like you’ve had a nice gab with your best friend.

I also like how vivacious Meg Cabot’s characters are: they’re flawed and quirky, and they’re all weird in their own little way, but they’re easy to relate to, and just downright funny!

Princess on the Brink is the eighth book in the series and has its share of laugh-out-loud funny moments like the rest of the series, although Mia has more to contend with — Precalculus, school elections,  and the fact that her boyfriend Michael is leaving for Japan for a year (or longer).

There’s something I don’t like about this book though — it brings to the fore what’s been bothering me since book six — how sex — or the fact that they’re not having it– is at the crux of Michael and Mia’s relationship. I don’t like how Michael has been pressuring Mia to have sex (because he says he can’t wait forever) and I wanted to slap him when he said it makes moving to Japan easier because he’s not getting any anyway. I also don’t like how this pressures Mia to almost do it as a ruse to get Michael to stay.

Considering the young readership of the series, I think it’s important to portray sex with responsibility, and I don’t like how the last few books have revolved around the issue, which isn’t even all that relevant to the story.

I don’t know how long it will be until I get copies of Princess Mia and Forever Princess (books 9 & 10) since they don’t seem to be coming up on BookMooch). But when I finally get to it, after reading The Princess Diaries for so many years (seven years now, a runner up to Harry Potter), reading the end of the series will definitely be memorable for me.

***

My copy: Princess Diaries, mass market paperback (from Book Sale); Princess Diaries 2, trade paperback; Princess Diaries 3&4: The Highs and Lows of Being Mia, 2-in-1 trade paperback; Princess Diaries 5, mass market paperback; Princess Diaries 6 & 7,  trade paperback (all from Powerbooks); Princess Diaries 8, hardcover, mooched from Iran. Need to upgrade books 1 and 5 to trade paperback, at least.

My rating:  Princess on the Brink, 3/5 stars. Series (as a whole) rating: 4/5 stars

*cover photo courtesy of sxc.hu (vela)