The DCBC met on Sunday, December 4, 2022 to discuss November's book: The Princess Beard, by Delilah Dawson and Kevin Hearne (selected by Emily Y.)
Attendees were: Emily Y., Jessy, Kristyn, Miriam, and Sarah.
The Princess Beard is the third installment in The Tales of Pell series. It opens with Morgan, a princess who has just awoken from a long slumber in a tower to find her hair and fingernails have grown excessively long. She breaks off her long fingernails and cuts off her braids, using them to escape, but keeps the beard she has grown as a disguise. Morgan goes on to find a pirate crew to serve with, aboard a ship called The Puffy Peach, under the one-eyed parrot pirate captain Filthy Lucre.
Morgan is hardly the main character of this book, however. The Princess Beard is more of an ensemble cast of misfit characters. Vic (short for Pissing Victorious), is a swole dude-bro of a centaur who is ashamed of his magical gift--the ability to conjure tea and cupcakes. Tempest is a flesh-eating dryad who has ambitions of becoming a lawyer to see that justice is served. Alobartalus is an elf who is on a quest to meet his hero (never meet your heroes).
The crew discover that what they thought they wanted is not actually what they want, come to accept themselves, foil a dastardly plot, save the day, and realize they have found a family of sorts among one another.
Ultimately this is not a bad message, so we gave it points for that. Vic and Tempest were also our favorite characters, as well as the things that they satirized, i.e. misogyny and law school / Hogwarts, respectively. (The law school Tempest briefly attends is a very silly place called BogTorts.) We thought Vic's superpower would actually be pretty cool to have, which Vic himself comes to realize by the end once he sheds his toxic masculinity stemming from his Daddy IssuesTM.
The Princess Beard makes a lot of cultural references, knowledge of which are probably helpful in understanding the jokes it makes, and this book is 69% jokes*. There were also several instances of potty humor (anterior bodily function and anatomy humor). Overall, the humor in The Princess Beard was not to most of the group's taste, but serious fans of South Park and Rick and Morty might have a good time with this.
The Verdict:
Taken from the average DCBC member ratings on Goodreads who had marked the book as read and rated at the time of this writing:
The Princess Beard: 2.75 stars
Thank you to Emily Y. for hosting!
*See what I did there?
Next Month: January 2023: Mrs Death Misses Death, by Salena Godden (selected by committee--this is something new we're trying; see The Rules! for an explanation).
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE
ReplyDelete