Princess Diaries book club

Funny story, I went and wrote a Princess Diaries book club post where I had already created the pictures thinking, “That’s funny, why didn’t I publish this when I made these pictures years ago?” Well I did, so I’m republishing it,, but I’m going to add in my extra things from when I rewrote this post, because why not? Now I return you to past Ticia 2021. I swear, I would lose my head if it wasn’t attached.

Way back when I was recently graduated from college and was still in that magical time of life when you have all the free time in the world, the Princess Diaries movie came out. I went and saw it because that’s what you do when you have endless free time. Then I found out there was a Princess Diaries book, and of course, that meant I had to read it. After which I discovered it was an entire series, and I read probably the first half dozen books in the series before abruptly deciding I really didn’t like the series, and the protagonist was really not all that appealing. Then I put together my book and a movie list and handed it to my daughter and she read the first book.

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Princess Diaries book

The concept behind Princess Diaries is the dream of many girls at some point. Who hasn’t dreamed of finding out they were secretly a princess all along and you are in line to rule a kingdom?

Actually, I didn’t. I dreamed of being a runaway who survived in the wild. When I got slightly older, I added in secret powers and fighting a great evil.

I was an odd duck.

But, Mia is the average high school student, she feels awkward and really wonders what the heck her life is about. One day her life completely changed when her Dad informs her, he isn’t just some super-rich guy who pops in from time to time, he’s the crown prince of Genovia and she is now the heir because he can no longer have kids (that is an amusing sub-plot as she talks about how horrible to think of her Dad like that).

Now she has princess lesson in addition to normal high school and how will she cope with her Mom dating her Algebra teacher?

Princess Diaries book club

Princess read this as part of her independent book choice over the summer of her 7th-grade year. I’ll admit I may have pointed her towards it because I enjoy the movie a bit more than the book, and I thought it would be interesting to discuss with her this glimpse into a teen girl’s head (the book is first-person point of view).

After reading, we talked all about how very different Mia’s viewpoint is from ours.

Mia has some odd people she looks up to. One of her assignments as part of her princess lessons is to write an essay on a person she looks up to, and she chooses a woman who had a Lifetime movie made about her. It was weird.

We also discussed how much life can change in a very short time.

But, if you want a more official Princess Diaries book club (our summer book clubs primarily consist of talking about what we thought, and ideas brought up, and that’s it)

• Fifth Grade book club: Princess Diaries (podcast)
• Princess Diaries discussion questions

Future Ticia’s stuff:

• How would you feel to have your family history hidden from you? Why do you think this is a common storyline?
• Have you had similar struggles to Mia?
• What mistakes do you think Mia made that you would have avoided if you were in her situation?

And I did a few searches and found a few other places that had some questions for you to work through if you want some more questions.

• Princess Diaries guide
• Another Princess Diaries guide

Some fun YouTube Princes Diaries Videos

These are the videos I love to discuss with my teens about the books. Just to warn you Lost in Adaptation has language.

And then, I just found out, Cinema Therapy has an episode about the movie, but you need to know this is only about the movie, they don’t have a response to the book and probably don’t even know the book exists.

But, those can be fun to discuss.

Princess Diaries snacks

I like the Princess Diaries movie, I’m not really sure why, because it’s not a particularly good movie, but for some reason I do. As a side note, the second movie is also fun, but only shares the names of characters from the book, but nothing to do with any actual plot.

So, let’s look at our Princess Diaries snacks!

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• fancy dress- my bell cookie cutter makes a great ball gown cookie with some slight changes using my sugar cookie recipe
• FOIL- Algebra was the bane of Mia’s life and she was constantly complaining about how FOIL makes no sense
• bodyguard- gingerbread men, an excuse to get gingerbread cookies really
• Diary- of course, you have to have the titular diary, and so we made our usual books with Nuggets and the lorum ipsum book pages (also on the subscriber page)
• Crown for a princess- this could have also been a cookie (I’ve certainly done that before), but we just used pretzels because I was lazy
• Fat Louis- Mia’s cat, because he’s so fat, we chose to make him marshmallows, the kids loved an excuse to eat lots of marshmallows, we also melted some chocolate fondue (in my mini crockpot, which seems to stick around solely for this purpose) to dip them in, and then added in some strawberries with absolutely nothing to do with anything other than they taste good in chocolate
• Princess lessons- cucumber sandwiches (Princess was happy) and fancy cakes (WOW Amazon! That is an insane price), her lessons involved lots of drinking tea and how to properly use silverware
• Champagne- at the time I didn’t have a particularly appealing pitcher, so it’s an ugly plastic pitcher with a combination of grape juice and sprite, there was a second pitcher for the wine
• “I’m a vegetarian”- Mia’s father insists on serving her steak, and she keeps trying to tell him, she doesn’t eat meat, so giant batch of steak
• “I survived on rolls and salad”- giant bowl of salad, and some rolls I’d made
• The Wind- I have no picture of what this snack was, and I’m not remembering it, traditionally anything air like becomes Sprite for my kids as an excuse to get Sprite

More 6th-grade book and a movie combos

We’ve read through almost all of the books on my 6th-grade book and a movie list, so I’ve blogged about quite a few of them

• Wizard of Oz book club
• To Kill a Mockingbird book club
• Treasure Island book club
• Percy Jackson book club
• Redwall book club

Originally published March 18, 2021