Meet the Princess Awesome Book Club Curator: Diana Peterfreund

When Eva and Rebecca offered me the opportunity to curate the Princess Awesome Book Club, I was so excited. As a children’s author for the last ten years, I’ve witnessed the profound influence books can have on young minds. I myself discovered the world in large part through books, and with a daughter of my own, I see the way she learns and envisions the world around her changing with everything she reads.

And I’m not just talking about non-fiction or “literary” books, either. My daughter is a huge fan of comic books, especially the DC Superhero Girls series by Shea Fontana, in which the female superheroes (and a few super villains) of the DC comic universe are reimagined as roommates at a superpowered high school. Can a straight arrow like Wonder Woman find common ground with a prankster like Harley Quinn? Can a bunch of kids really end up saving the day?

That’s one of the things I really love about children’s books. In their pages, kids aren’t helpless bystanders in an unknowable world—they are just young people, with the same abilities and potential as adults.

There’s a saying by A Wrinkle In Time author Madeleine L’Engle, regarding whether children’s books are a lesser medium of art: “You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.”

For children have the power to make the world a better place, and they are going to use it.

*****************************************
Diana Peterfreund has published more than a dozen novels for adults, teens, and kids, including the four-book Secret Society Girl series (Bantam Dell), the “killer unicorn novels” Rampantand Ascendant (Harper Teen), For Darkness Shows the Stars (a post-apocalyptic retelling of Jane Austen’s Persuasion), and Across a Star-Swept Sea (inspired by the classic series The Scarlet Pimpernel). Her newest series, OMEGA CITY, is a contemporary adventure novel for younger readers set in a secret bunker city somewhere under modern Maryland.

Her works have been named to the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age list, the Capitol Choices (metro DC-area) reading list, and the Texas Lonestar List, as well as having been named to Amazon’s Best Books of the Year. In addition, she’s written several critically acclaimed short stories and a variety of non-fiction essays about  popular children’s literature.  Diana lives outside Washington D.C., with her family.