The Princess Diaries taught me about growing up – and Marxism. Bring on the third film | Rebecca Liu

Through adolescent realism and glittering fantasy, Princess Mia showed me more about life than my textbooks ever did

News of Hollywood franchise reboots are so frequent as to be usually unremarkable, even tiresome. But Disney's announcement last week that it was developing a Princess Diaries 3 film felt different. The Princess Diaries 3 movie," in the words of a popular tweet, will heal our broken nation."

That may sound over-dramatic - after all, cultural objects beloved by teenage girls invite suspicion at worst and polite tolerance at best; things that also fall under the banner of chick-lit" doubly so. And yet the films, and the Meg Cabot books that provided their source material, arguably taught my teenaged self more about life - and even politics - than textbooks did. They were certainly more fun.

Rebecca Liu is a Guardian commissioning editor