Fantasy

The Slim Princess

by George Ade

192 pages · First published 2005

Princess Kalora is considered far too thin by the standards of her fictional European homeland, where plumpness is treated as an essential mark of beauty and status. Her family’s efforts to make her suitably fashionable become increasingly absurd, especially when American ideas and an American suitor complicate the established rules. George Ade uses the reversed beauty standard to satirize social expectations, wealth, courtship, and the arbitrary nature of fashion. The comic novel turns a supposedly defective princess into the clearest observer of a society whose standards make much less sense than everyone assumes.