In A Christmas Princess, which centers on a character named Little Mariah, Carey weaves a fairy tale that has much in common with her life. ‘Prince Charming didn’t come in. He saved the day.’
Mariah Carey wants you to know that she is 12 years old forever. “Can you write it down?” he asked. This could explain this seemingly impossible problem on the space-time continuum. (For the record, and according to the Gregorian calendar, she is 52 years old.) First, the self-proclaimed “Queen of Christmas” does not age but lives “from Christmas to Christmas.”
More importantly, as he said, 12 is the age of his mind.
It’s also the age at which she begins to learn the difficult but valuable – and ultimately rewarding – life lessons she lays out in her new children’s book, A Christmas Princess, which hits stores Tuesday. The main character in this book is a 12-year-old girl named Maria, but that is not an autobiography. “It’s a fairy tale,” Carey says – although some details sound similar to how she described her childhood. Little Mariah’s house is a “shack,” unlike the other houses down the street. The ladder has sharp, exposed nails in the planks.
The hero’s mother’s name is La Diva. (Carey’s mother, Patricia, is an opera singer.) There’s some other overlap, too. “It was at that age that I learned that I was completely ‘different,'” he said. She lives with a white mother and black father in a small town on Long Island, New York. “It would be great to be a chameleon, but I don’t have the tools for that. That means we have no money.”