Ceridwen

I fucking hate this book. I'm about to go on a cuss-driven attack, and I'm going to hide my hate under cover of spoiler, so if you don't like cussing, you can go somewhere else and think about magical unicorns or something, because this is not the review for you. God bless.

This book is a bunch of fucking bullshit. I don't know how it came into my house, but I'm pretty sure it was one of those situations where I was in the book store, and said that both of my kids could pick a book, and then I ended up having to navigate how much I hate Greg Hefley's middle school fucking douchery versus how much I hate motherfucking princess uselessness. I'm betting I lost both fights.

So, here's the thing. I have both a boy and a girl. I'm sensitive to my being weirder about girly-fucking-bullshit than boy-fucking bullshit. Like, princess stuff makes me itch all over my body, but I know that part of this is growing up a girl, and being a late-model feminist, so I don't want to put down the parental hammer harder on pop cultural things aimed at girls that suck than pop cultural things aimed at boys that suck just because I have a hard, mammalian response to them. So.

But this book is fucking useless. I see now it's 4 in a likely unending series of Tiara Club books, where Princess TSTL hangs out with her friends and tries to navigate a brain-dead version of Hogwarts. Princess TSTL - that acronym is "too stupid to live", fyi - has to get "tiara points" for stuff like "floating down the fucking staircase" or "wearing clothes like a whore" or "hair-brushing", and due to some stupid ass shenanigans, TSTL gets mistaken for Princess Prue, and then some vaguely Shakespearean bullshit goes down, but, like, without the wit, cross-dressing, or iambic pentameter of the Bard.

But, backing up, I am so godamn angry about the activities that these godamn "princesses" have to perform to become "real princesses", or whatever. Cutting bread, walking down some godamn stairs, wearing clothes right. Fuck you. The evil near-sighted bitches who run the Princess Academy are arbitrary and senseless, and the message about "telling the truth" when those uncharitable and useless dictators mistake you for someone else and give you points for it is tacked on, at best. Let's just say that I don't think that it's ethically problematic to let fucking idiots subvert their own unfair, arbitrary system through their own stupidity. You need to seek out the systems of power that give you privilege and destroy them, girls and boys, and this book preaches the opposite of that. No.

And there's a Magic Mirror like the Sorting Hat at Hogwarts, and both need to die in a fiery fire. Flames, burn.

Anyway, after reading half this shit to the girl last night, interspersed with angry outbursts from me that made bedtime a little rocky, and then reading the other half tonight to myself just to see how it fucking ends, I'm going to take this total genderfail piece of shit from hell and shove it under the rotten potatoes in the trash can. A-fucking-men.