posted on 14 Mar 2021

Not in that Dress, Princess! By Wendy Meddour, illustrated by Cindy Wume

What a joy to see a picture book cover with an evidently brave young Princess cleaning the teeth of a hippopotamus as he lazes in the water. Two Princes, with horrified expressions on their faces, watch from the riverbank. So, right from the outset , my granddaughter and I realised that this was going to be a story about a girl who does stuff.

Some of you will know that I always notice interesting end papers. Before the story proper started we spent some time looking at the many pictures painted by the princess. But we wondered why she looked rather cross as they showed her having some splendid adventures -  from posing with a fierce tiger to swinging from a cactus. All becomes clear on the next pages as we learn more about her frustration. Bess is a Princess who just hates being restricted by her clothes. Her mother Queen Glorianna Stephaness, insists that she always wears a dress in keeping with her royal position.

Every time she played games that were deemed ‘unladylike’ we joined in with the queen’s refrain ‘NOT IN THAT DRESS!’

We really enjoyed reading about how often she got told off, helped with plenty of amusing little illustrations. We also liked the rhyming text that made reading together great fun:

‘Can I climb a tree?

Have chips for tea?

Can I feed the pigs?

Try on wigs?’

Thank goodness Bess decides that she has had enough of such unreasonable nagging and runs off to have fun anyway. She soon proves that wearing a dress is no problem when it comes to splashing in a fountain, fixing a broken socket, skiing through a blizzard, brushing a lion’s mane and much more. My favourite page shows her at night time with her telescope:

‘I can stargaze with a puffin, I can eat a chocolate muffin’.

Naomi liked the gorgeously coloured page with Bess meeting a wizard with a long beard long beard. She thought it was great to see everyone dancing and it was funny to see one of the princes with a strange elephant nose!

We spent a long time looking at the detail in the amusing pictures. There is a good mix of double and single page spreads and we liked the way that the text and illustrations worked together to keep the story moving along.

We talked about how ridiculous the queen was being and why perhaps she was so fixated on keeping her daughter under control. We thought about why her brothers didn’t have the same constraints and whether that was fair. Should boys and girls be treated differently? We were pleased to see that Bess proved that wearing a dress was no problem at all, and that the princes were rather jealous.

The final end papers showed us that the three of them could have a happy time together and that:

‘ THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN’T DO IN A DRESS!’

 

Karen Argent  and Naomi Adeoya ( age six)

March 2021