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The prince's dressmaker5/22/2023 The dressmaker is Frances, one of many seamstresses working at a local dress shop. A ball is being held to celebrate his sixteenth birthday, and his parents are eager for him to find a princess to marry, as he will have to carry on the royal line. Prince Sebastian is the Crown Prince of Belgium, and he and his parents the king and queen are staying in Paris for the summer. I hesitate to spoil it any more than I already have-the best way to review the book without risking any of its pleasures would be to write a simple, two-word imperative, “Read it”-but when the extent of the acceptance being offered the prince first begins to take shape, it is about as electric and triumphant a moment in a comic book that I can remember. Wang’s characters are so fully realized, their conflicts and emotions so palpable, and their world so exact, so vital, and so well executed that it’s easy to forget that it is a fairy tale-at least until the happy ending arrives, the first signs of it doing so striking like a lightning bolt. That The Prince and the Dressmaker invites such criticism is actually a credit to it. That prince, in some scenes, even dresses a bit like the Prince Charming of Disney’s Cinderella, with which Wang’s tale has some thematic commonality. And Wang’s book is very much a fairy tale, even opening with a ball being thrown for a handsome young prince, where it is hoped he will find a princess to marry.
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