My little adorable pink princess. Subverting the princess template in the Grace picture book series

White English writer Mary Hoffman came up with the Grace Series in the early 1990s. Here in Germany, only the first book Amazing Grace has been published (Alibaba Ffm, 1999). Grace loves stories and acting and wants the role of Peter Pan in the school play. Only problem is, she is a girl and she is Black. Her nana and mother encourage her to give it a try and her determination leads her to question established roles along gender and race constructs.

I recently checked out some other titles in the series like Princess Grace, a good book to begin reading with the little princess fans who adore wearing pink or purple and cannot tire of their favourite Grimm and Andersson fairytales, popularised and commercialised by Disney.

Take a look at Mary Hoffman's article published in The Guardian which shows her disgust for pink passivity in picture books and the harm it continues to inflict on girls all over the world:

'Down with princesses, I say! And fairies. And unicorns, rainbows, ponies and mermaids. And pink. And possibly purple, too, especially in conjunction with pink and definitely if there is any silver glitter involved. I'm sick of it all. Young girls growing up today are offered an almost exclusive diet of synthetic, comercially exploitative pap'.

This was one reason she decided to create the picture book Princess Grace, featuring the Black protagonist Grace who discovers princesses in different hues that actually do things rather than just look pretty and wait for a prince to come along. Other titles in the series like Encore, Grace, a junior reader chapter book, further open up and question the conventional princess stories by having Grace and her classmates reinterpret the roles of their favourite fairytales, like Sleeping Beauty. Perhaps Hoffman's main reason for publishing the Grace Series was to offer her dark-haired, princess-loving daughter (whose father is half-Indian) another version of what a princess can look like and be.

Self-hate among children of colour; obsession with blue-eyed blondness as the epitome of beauty; rejection of anything brown or black as ugly; lack of self-esteem; being the victim of racist remarks and discrimination...these are real problems that start at preschool and get dragged into adult life in post-colonial societies where white supremacy propaganda is alive and kicking.

In an interview with Booktrust, Hoffman calls for more books on diversity and talks about her own personal interests in representing diversity: 'More than ever, children need books that are exciting, surprising and stimulating. They need 'mirror' books and 'window' books: stories that reflect themselves but also all sorts of lives they have never imagined'.

It should be noted that these books start with the premise that being Black is somehow a barrier to overcome. The series then introduces positive figures in history (a Black star ballerina, Nigerian and Chinese princesses) to look up to or emulate thereby empowering child readers. Blackness is thematised and it could be argued that in the title books Grace and Family and Boundless Grace, Africa is exoticised. The author made her first visit to AFRICA..the Gambia is apparently too small to make the point - to meet the people who inspired the illustrations of Grace and her family. She admits that she couldn't have written the book without this journey: 'It was my first trip to Africa which was mind-blowing in itself. And I met the models for Grace, Ma and Nana for the first time. I swam in the Atlantic Ocean with them, danced with a witch doctor and stroked a huge crocodile. I couldn't have written the book without going there'.

For readers interested in Black protagonists whose colour isn't at the centre of the text, see the picture books by Toni Morrison, bell hooks or Ezra Keats.