And at first, this is glorious for Frances, who can let her imagination rule her designs for an appreciative client.

Secretly going out in Frances’s elaborate gowns as Lady Crystallia is an antidote to the parade of eligible young ladies whom his father the King of Belgium forces him to meet. Not all the time, but when he wants to feel like himself, and feel strong.

Prince Sebastian is a prince who wears dresses. And for him, it’s a relief: to share his secret love of wearing dresses with someone who will care about making them and him look the best they can possibly be, and who loves high fashion as much as he does. It’s the job of a lifetime for her: to create costumes for a client with bold and adventurous tastes. And soon Frances, who both designed and sewed it, is working for the prince as his private seamstress, hired to make him dresses. He’s not in love with her, though rather, it’s her dress. We see the prince in shadows watching her attentively. One particularly rebellious eligible young lady, however, comes clothed in an unusual gown-“Make me look like the devil’s wench,” she tells Frances the dressmaker, who was assigned to her at the last minute. It begins with the announcement of a ball where all eligible young ladies will be introduced to Crown Prince Sebastian of Belgium, who is celebrating his 16th birthday. The Prince and the Dressmaker is a fairy tale-but an edgy one with modern elements laced through its 19th century Paris. Handsome, sensitive, and kind as a boy, and glamorous and outgoing in his alter ego Lady Crystallia, Prince Sebastian redefines what it means to be a fairy tale prince. No reader is going to laugh at Prince Sebastian. I’m glad that this beautiful, engaging, and fun graphic novel will stand up against those responses. In certain school plays for this book’s readership (including one that I saw last year), boys in dresses provide comic relief, teaching boys and girls that mockery is the expected response. Jen Wang’s The Prince and the Dressmaker is for an upper middle grade crowd, but is also a welcome addition to its own scene of books. Progressive parents and schools snapped this up, and many children learned that a boy who wanted to wear a dress was no big deal, just part of who he was. In 2014, Christine Baldacchino and Isabelle Malenfant introduced Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress to the picture book scene, a story about a boy who liked to wear a dress.

The prince and the dressmaker author