For Fans of Meg Cabot

The first Princess Diaries novel is the perfect entry point, and it is not a close competition. Mia's voice arrives fully formed on page one: anxious, funny, desperately self-deprecating, and completely impossible to put down. The setup (ordinary girl discovers she is heir to a small European principality and has exactly zero interest in the job) sounds like a premise from a pitch meeting, but Cabot plays it entirely through Mia's diary, which transforms it into something that feels genuinely intimate and genuinely funny. You can pick up the whole ten-book series from there, or use it as a passport to the wider Cabot catalog once you understand the frequency her heroines operate on.

When Lightning Strikes opens the 1-800-Where-R-You series and it never gets enough credit for how well it works. Jess Mastriani is struck by lightning and wakes up able to locate missing children by looking at their photos. Cabot takes the premise seriously while keeping the comedy ruthlessly intact, and the result is a series that moves faster and hits harder than the royal books. The romantic tension with Rob Wilkins is one of her best slow burns, and the stakes are higher than anything in Genovia. The series ran before Princess Diaries swallowed all the attention, and it deserves to be rediscovered.

The 2001 film strips the diary format and compresses a lot, but what it keeps is the essential thing: a girl who does not want to be special having to figure out who she is anyway. Anne Hathaway and Julie Andrews have a warmth that makes you forgive every deviation from the source. The makeover scene gets remembered, but the better moments are the quiet ones: Mia's embarrassment, her grandmother's refusal to be impressed, the way the film lets the comedy carry genuine feeling underneath it. It also introduced the world to Genovia, which is frankly a gift.

Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before is the closest thing the 2010s produced to a Meg Cabot novel. The self-awareness, the accidental romantic entanglements, the very specific domestic detail, the heroine who catastrophizes beautifully: it is all there. Han writes Lara Jean the way Cabot writes Mia, which is to say with total affection and total honesty about how embarrassing it is to be a person who feels things that loudly. The Netflix adaptation captures it surprisingly well too, making it a rare double recommendation.