Meg Cabot
Meg Cabot is an author.
Meg Cabot has published more than eighty novels across young adult and adult fiction, which is the first thing to understand about her. She is a professional in the older sense of the word, running several genres at once and switching between them without visibly changing gear. The Princess Diaries made her name, Disney turned it into two feature films, and that series is how most readers arrive.
Her strength is first-person comedy. The Princess Diaries books are told in diary entries, lists and panicked asides, and the joke is always the same good one: an extraordinary situation described in an entirely ordinary register, by a narrator with no time for the extraordinary part. Princess in Waiting, Project Princess, The Highs and Lows of Being Mia and Forever Princess carry the series here. The first volume is not among the credits listed.
Around it she built several other franchises. The Mediator books (Haunted) are paranormal high school. 1-800-Where-R-You and Vanished are the psychic-detective sequence. Avalon High transplants Arthurian legend into an American high school. (Airhead #1) is a body-swap satire of celebrity culture. Insatiable is a vampire comedy from the height of the vampire boom, and it is funnier than most of what stood beside it, and Size 12 Is Not Fat opens the Heather Wells books, her adult comic-crime series.
She also writes adult romance, historical and contemporary (Educating Caroline, An Improper Proposal, She Went All the Way, Queen of Babble), and contributes to anthologies including Star Wars - From a Certain Point of View and Prom Nights from Hell. Her awards are the librarian-and-teacher kind rather than the literary kind: New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, ALA Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers, a run of state young-reader prizes. That is the right measure for her, because the thing she does best is get a reluctant reader to the last page.
Books (24)
- Jinx (2007)
- (Airhead #1) (2008)
- Haunted (2003)
- Underworld (2012)
- Size 12 Is Not Fat (2005)
- Insatiable (2010)
- 1-800-Where-R-You (2003)
- Forever Princess (2009)
- Victoria and the Rogue (2003)
- Ransom My Heart (1890)
- Educating Caroline (2001)
- 1-800-Where-R-You (2003)
- Project Princess (2003)
- Princess in Waiting (2003)
- Queen of Babble (2007)
- Avalon High (2007)
- She Went All the Way (2002)
- Vanished (2011)
- An Improper Proposal (1999)
- The New Girl (Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls #2) (2008)
- Significant Objects (2012)
- The Highs and Lows of Being Mia (2004)
- Star Wars - From a Certain Point of View (2017)
- Prom Nights from Hell (2007)
Where to start with Meg Cabot
Forever Princess is the final Princess Diaries volume and therefore the wrong place to begin. If the series is what brought you, find the first book elsewhere and come back for Princess in Waiting and The Highs and Lows of Being Mia.
What does work cold is Avalon High: standalone, short, and the cleanest demonstration of the Cabot method, which is to take a large mythic idea and run it entirely through a teenager whose main concern is lunch.
For adult Cabot, Size 12 Is Not Fat is the one, a comic mystery with a likeable narrator and a plot that actually holds together. Insatiable is the funniest of the paranormals. Haunted is the Mediator series at its most confident. Queen of Babble is holiday reading and knows exactly what it is.
The Princess Diaries series
Ten main books plus a shelf of novellas, written as Mia's diary throughout, and the voice is the whole appeal. The early volumes are broad comedy about a teenager discovering she is royalty; the later ones follow her into college and get noticeably more serious about anxiety and ambition.
Cabot's paranormal and Arthurian books
The supernatural side of her output, and it is more inventive than the covers suggest. Avalon High retells Arthurian legend inside an American high school, the Mediator books put a teenage girl in the way of restless ghosts, and Insatiable is her vampire comedy.
The adult comedies and mysteries
Cabot writing for grown-ups, mostly in a comic register. The Heather Wells books follow a former teen pop star working in a New York university dorm, a job Cabot held herself for a decade, who keeps stumbling into murder investigations she is spectacularly unqualified for.