Princess in Waiting – Talents Are Hidden Everywhere

Well, I’m back to reading this series that I never completed in my teen years, sans a few of the books. I seem to breeze through each of them in just a week or even a few days if I binge. No matter, here are my thoughts on the fourth volume.

So, the book starts with Mia on her first visit to Genovia and I tried to picture the palace as lovely as it was in the second film. I got it pretty close I guess, but Mia obviously write that she is drop-dead bored during her stay as there’s no time for fun or to discuss safety issues in the country like the lack of parking meters or traffic lights in some areas, I’m not kidding, that is what she said!

Then she meets her cousin Prince Rene whom she describes as annoying, runs off with girls he’s older than and Mia secretly jokes about how she caught him enjoying music of the Spanish singer Enrique Iglesias which I can’t for the love of Primus, spell on my own, so I had to copy and paste his name while writing this! I haven’t heard that guy on the radio in ages.

Anyway, when Mia returns home, she is jet-lagged, no surprise and hopes to finally go on her first date with Michael at a dinner-theater like place showing A New Hope. When I read some of the other books earlier in life, I never took Mia for much of a Star Wars fan given some content I saw in book V and VII but I guess I was wrong. Hell, she even mentions she lost her lucky Queen Amidala panties. (so it seems she likes the prequel trilogy too which makes me happy since it seems the only love goes to the OT and the ST these days which the latter I tried to give a chance but TLJ left me with utter disappointment and Rogue One is the only thing I’ve liked from that era ever since)

Mia is also distraught because as a new semester begins, she feels she still doesn’t belong in this Gifted and Talented class, which I guess is similar to study hall which I did a lot in high school, especially in my last two years there. Tina goes through a breakup, Shameeka becomes a cheerleader, and Lilly gets an opportunity to make her cable show more official. Michael on the other hand is hoping to start a band which is cool because you see that in the movie, but he’s also recently turned into a Linux fanatic and I have a small grudge toward that community about that OS which makes me reluctant to interact with people who use it, even if we have other interests we share, but that’s a story for another time.

So you can imagine Mia feels like a talentless freak as she described. I’ve gotten better at picturing her from scratch as I read these books like with a pixie blond hairdo, you know, like Princess Diana.

She becomes extremely paranoid in this book when her grandmother tries to take her to a ball hosted but her supposedly archnemesis and Mia refuses because it’s the same night as her date with Michael, but I feel like there’s a time where she eventually learns to empathize with Clarisse and eventually agree to go when she learns that she too is insecure and her rivalry with this other woman is no different than between Mia and Lana. Well, at least that’s what Mia thought only to learn she was still being used the whole time!

Well, like any other, she still got her happy ending with Michael as you might expect, so I thought this book was okay but I certainly didn’t dislike it.

Up next is the fifth book which I read twice a long time ago, so we’ll see how much I remember and how fast I go through it!