The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch

At first glance The Paper Bag Princess is the kind of picture book one might read in five minutes and, in good conscience, tuck back on a shelf. Read closely, however, it behaves more like a miniature manifesto: a tight, witty demolition of fairy-tale expectations that nevertheless leaves room to teach — not by sermonizing, but by staging a single, devastating reversal.

Munsch’s prose is spare, colloquial, and deliberately unadorned. He writes like a storyteller at the kitchen table: quick cadences, plain vocabulary, and an ear for comic timing. That simplicity is not a concession to child readers but a structural choice. By removing ornate diction and moralizing gloss, he exposes the raw mechanics of the tale — the sequence of catastrophe, quest, triumph, and social reckoning — so that what remains is the action itself and the moral it performs. The result is a fable that feels immediate and adult in its irony while remaining playfully accessible to children.

At the heart of the book is Elizabeth, who refuses to conform to the passive template of the traditional princess. Her ingenuity — taking what she has, improvising a disguise from a paper bag, outsmarting a dragon — foregrounds competence over ornament. The book stages a double reversal: Elizabeth saves Prince Ronald, and then she refuses to be praised in the way the fairy tale usually requires. When Ronald insists on equating worth with appearance and social polish, Elizabeth’s final refusal is not merely a punch line; it is a moral exemplum about agency and dignity. Munsch does not idealize Elizabeth into an unassailable hero; rather, he makes her credible and human, thereby giving the book its sharp ethical bite.

Michael Martchenko’s illustrations are essential collaborators in this subversion. His energetic lines, exaggerated expressions, and economical compositions translate then author’s dry humour into visual gags and emotional beats. The paper bag — ridiculous, fragile, embarrassingly domestic — becomes an iconic costume; its very absurdity highlights Elizabeth’s resourcefulness and Ronald’s shallowness. The images do not sentimentalize the heroine; they keep the scene brisk, often comic, and thereby amplify the story’s satirical thrust.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is how it negotiates tone. It remains light and comic even as it stages a serious critique of gender norms. That tonal balance allows readers of different ages to take away different lessons: children relish the adventurous rescue and the funny image of a princess in a paper bag; older readers can trace the book’s interrogation of performative femininity and the social economics of worth. This multivalent readability is why the book has remained culturally significant: it functions simultaneously as entertainment, as subversive revision, and as a compact ethical lesson.

There are, of course, lines of critique worth noting. The book’s black-and-white moral — competence rewarded, vanity punished — may strike some as reductive; Elizabeth’s final dismissal of Ronald is satisfying but swift, leaving complex questions of reconciliation and social consequence unexplored. And because the book trades in caricature (the dragon’s swagger, Ronald’s petulant shallowness), some subtleties of gender and power remain intentionally flattened for rhetorical clarity. But these choices are defensible: Munsch is not giving a case study, he is performing a parable.

Ultimately, The Paper Bag Princess endures because it does more than invert a trope: it repositions the reader. It asks us to measure value not by adornment but by action, to laugh at absurd hierarchies, and to recognize that agency often looks messy. As a teaching tool, a bedtime story, or a text for a classroom conversation about gender and narrative, it remains exemplary — small in scale but large in consequence. In an age when many children’s stories default to passive heroines or glittering moral gloss, Munsch’s book still cuts sharp: deceptively simple, unexpectedly brave, and thoroughly, deliciously subversive.