The Princess and the Pea is a crap book with a crap message and I will never read it to my daughter again. A review:
I love reading to my daughter. And I was excited to read to her books that I remember from my childhood. For example, The Princess and the Pea. But I didn’t remember (or didn’t realize) what a terrible story it is.
As I was reading The Princess and the Pea to my daughter I was thinking to myself (and saying out loud), “what kind of awful message is this for girls?” Basically the story is: a Prince is looking for a wife. His wife has to be a princess (class-ist). He can marry any princess he wants (sexist). First a bunch of princesses come to him, but he doesn’t like them. Then he travels to meet more princesses, but doesn’t like them either. Think Goldilocks as a guy, and the porridge is princesses.
Then, back at home, during a rain storm, a girl (Polly) knocks on the door and asks if she can spend the night. “She didn’t look much like a princess,” says the book. WTF is a princess supposed to look like? The entire book so far has been how different every princess looks and is! So girls have to look a certain way to be accepted? GTFOH.
The unnamed prince (only princesses have names, apparently) fell in love with Polly because she was “pretty and funny and kind.” So looks are most important and intelligence isn’t even listed. Cool. But because Polly didn’t “look like a princess” the queen had to test her to make sure she was, in fact, a princess, because again, the prince can ONLY marry a princess. Polly gets into a bed with a bunch of mattresses, and a pea under the bottom mattress, and only a princess would feel the pea, which of course Polly does, and so the prince asks Polly to marry him and she says yes. THEY’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER LITERALLY LESS THAN 24 HOURS. We never find out if Polly even likes the prince; the entire plot is he wants a wife, he searches for a wife, he gets a wife, end of story.
I give this book NEGATIVE #GirlDads.