I stumbled upon these graphic novel series at BBW 2024 and although I found volume #1 and #2, I decided to buy only the first one just in case it was not really my cup of tea. Plus, volume #2 was priced much higher than volume #1 for some reason. But now I regret it so much! I fell in love with these series so deeply and I can see myself wanting to re-read it in the future.
In Pastel Kingdom, there are three princesses and a prince. They’re all beautiful, especially the prince and have fairy tale-like princess powers like animals who help them and flowers that bloom around them. Oh, except the last princess, who was born for the lack of a better word, ugly. But since all in the family never treated her differently, she never thought of herself as lacking in the good looks department, until she overheard her betrothed calling her ugly behind her back. One day she stumbled upon a group of monster-looking people who turned out to be part of the Cursed Princess Club, a club where people who were different and cursed gathered for safety. She felt somewhat belonged even though she was not in any way cursed. But she then learned that being accepted by others and being accepted by yourself are two very different things.
This book featured almost every single thing that I like: fairy tale retelling, self-love, genuine friendship, diversity, quiet love that builds up, strong characterization, learning from failures, beauty standards, gender-bending traits and hilarity. The author’s humour is just top-notch to me, I honestly don’t know how LambCat came up with some of the things they did. I found myself laughing out loud so many times because a lot of the jokes came out of nowhere!
I can see myself re-reading these graphic novels a few times, and yes, I would highly recommend this series to anyone who is interested! If you want to know if this is something that you’d enjoy, you could try reading it from Webtoon first. I rated all of the books in the series 5 shining bright stars!