A wry, dry, laugh-out-loud princess tale by the hilarious Lois Lowry, with illustrations by Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoonist Jules Feiffer.
Princess Patricia Priscilla is bored with her royal life and the excitement surrounding her sixteenth birthday ball. Doomed to endure courtship by three grotesquely unappealing noblemen, she adopts a peasant disguise and escapes her fate—for a week.
In this tale of mistaken identity, creamed pigeons, and young love, the two-time Newbery medalist Lois Lowry compares princesses to peasants and finds them to be exactly the same in all the important ways.
What happens when a princess trades her tiara for bare feet and a day at the village school?
- Royalty in Disguise: Princess Patricia Priscilla isn’t just bored—she’s trading places with her chambermaid to live as a peasant girl named Pat.
- Hilarious Suitors: Forget Prince Charming. Patricia is doomed to choose between a weeping warthog-like Duke, a preening prince, and a pair of bickering, conjoined counts.
- A First Crush: At the village school, ‘Pat’ meets Rafe, the handsome new schoolmaster who has no idea he’s teaching a princess.
- Laugh-Out-Loud Humor: A witty, funny middle grade story from two-time Newbery medalist Lois Lowry, perfect for readers who love clever fairy tales with a twist.
Lois Lowry is the author of more than fifty books for children and young adults, including the New York Times bestselling Giver Quartet and the popular Anastasia Krupnik series. She has received countless honors, among them the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award, the California Young Reader Medal, and the Mark Twain Award. She received Newbery Medals for two of her novels, Number the Stars and The Giver.
Jules Feiffer's artistic sensibility permeates a wide range of creative work, from his Pulitzer-winning comic strip in the Village Voice, to his Obie Award-winning play
Little Murders, to his Oscar-winning anti-military short subject animation,
Munro, to his beloved illustrations for
The Phantom Tollbooth. Feiffer’s cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, and The Nation, and he was commissioned by The New York Times to create its first op-ed page comic strip which ran monthly until 2000, when Feiffer decided to start off the new millennium by giving up cartooning. Taking inspiration from his three daughters spanning three generations, he has reinvented himself as a children’s book author. His first book,
The Man in the Ceiling, was selected by Publisher’s Weekly and the New York Public Library as one of the year’s best children’s books.
A former instructor at the Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University, Feiffer is now an adjunct professor at Southampton College, a member of the Dramatists Guild Council and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This is his first book with Houghton Mifflin.
