The Princess Diaries is a chick-lit series written by Meg Cabot. The first volume, with the same title, was published in 2000. Unlike most novels, those in The Princess Diaries series are not sorted into chapters, but journal entries of varying lengths.

The series spent 38 weeks on the New York Times Children's Series Best Sellers List and has been sold to publishers in 37 foreign countries. As of April 14, 2006, the series was #4.

Plot

The Princess Diaries is the diary of Mia Thermopolis, a fourteen-year-old freshman at the fictional Albert Einstein High School, a private school in New York City.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Mia is a tall, socially awkward teenager who was raised by her liberal artist mother Helen in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Her parents had a brief fling and separated before she was born; she sees her father Phillipe Renaldo, whom she is told is a Genovian politician, mostly when she spends every summer at her grandmère (grandmother) Clarisse's French chateau, Miragnac.

Mia's world is thrown upside down when her father, who recently underwent treatment for testicular cancer, finds out he cannot have any more children--because he is really Prince Artur Cristoff Gerard Grimaldi Renaldo of Genovia, and he informs her that since he cannot produce another heir, she is now Amelia Mignonette Grimaldi Thermopolis Renaldo, Her Royal Highness, the princess of Genovia.

Mia does not adjust to this news easily; but she certainly objects when her father informs her she must now move to Genovia to learn to be a princess. Eventually, Grandmère decides to come to America to provide "princess lessons," which her father offers to pay her for. Mia declines, but asks instead that her father donate a hundred dollars a day to Greenpeace.