Princess in Pink – Dreams of the Prom

Okay, I’ve actually read this book at least twice when I was in my preteen years and it’s only this time do I recall things from it much better than I did years ago. I feel like there is also a time gap present so maybe I am missing a book in this series of what Mia did for Spring Break.

Anyway, Albert Einstein High School now has its own school paper run entirely by students and Mia is one of the contributors so I see she’s putting her talent to good use. There were some weird things on The Atom like Tina putting in an ad that she’s looking for a new boyfriend and is being a little too picky with things like age and height and no Metalheads!? What’s wrong with Metalheads!? As a Metalhead myself I can assure you Tina, that many of us are nice people sans a few jerk elitists. Apparently she briefly dated someone obsessed with the band Korn and it scared her away. I guess Tina is a type of sweet and innocent girl who listens to love songs all the time so no wonder. Pity, ah well, moving on.

Mia is desperately hoping to go to senior prom with Michael, well technically, it’s his senior prom since Mia is only a freshman thus the freshman dates senior cliche. Her friends try to encourage her to ask him instead if he won’t ask her but she strictly believes its too unromantic to ask him herself. When her fifteenth birthday rolls around, she doesn’t get that but instead disaster strikes when at her birthday dinner, her grandmother’s hairless rodent of a dog gets loose, a busboy trips over it, spills soup on the dowager princess and gets fired. Everything escalates afterwards with Lilly standing with said former busboy and then it leads to a city-wide strike.

On top of that, Michael finds the prom lame which he tells Mia at her birthday party when she finally bucks up the courage to ask him. I gotta say, I’m kind of on Michael’s side here because I chose to skip my prom when I was in high school because it sounded like a social nightmare to me. I don’t know what I did that night instead, I was probably gaming or listening to music instead.

I also gotta say, the one part that really triggered me in this novel was the part where Mia had to do a report on Aspergers Syndrome. Now we don’t really use that term for high-functioning autism anymore, but when my parents told me about my diagnosis, they said that’s what I had. Mia was initially upset about the report saying she’d rather write about Ebola instead because it’s a “cooler” disease. Um, what the actual fuck? Okay that’s silly.

Anyway, she wrote seeing ASD as a disease when that’s not what it is and some other things that I thought were stereotypical and started to assume that she and everyone else she knew lives with it. I don’t like how she said “suffer” with it. No one “suffers” with ASD, we just live with it.

I also feel really sorry for Boris and I don’t think I could ever be friends with someone like Lilly after having got to know her so far in this series, she just seems too political and breaking Boris’s heart like this, now this book has been her downfall for sure. And hey, on a positive note, Mia is now a big sister!

I’m not going to lower my grade on this book due to Mia’s report on ASD but it was still an enjoyable book to read. I’m glad I was able to pick it up again and I’m sure you can take a guess if Mia did go to the prom or not now can you? I do feel she can be a bit controlling as a girlfriend sometimes though. I really hope that changes because Michael should have a choice in things too.