Princess Peepers Picks a Pet

May 9, 2011
The Royal Academy of Perfect Princesses is having a pet show, and firm rules allowing only "pets with two or four legs," coupled with community standards that deem only cuddly pets as worthy, has ruled out Princess Peepers's first choices of bugs or a frog. Searching the forest for another candidate, the princess loses her glasses and stumbles on what she thinks is a flying unicorn. Needless to say, it is notâbut it does have four legs, and it ultimately earns the befuddled Princess Peepers "The Most Unusual Pet Award." In Princess Peepers (2008), Calvert and Mourning's bespectacled fashionista/tomboy prided herself on going rogue. But in this wan, sluggish follow-up, she's more Mr. Magoo. The jokes have predictable, myopic punch lines ("Your fur feels like it's caked with hard, scaly mud!" she tells her new pet), and the creature is so harmlessly adorable that there's never any doubt as to whether the Academy will accept it. If Princess Peepers really is the individualist that the authors claim she is, doesn't she deserve to épater le bourgeois with something a little edgier? Ages 5â9.