Review Detail

Reader reviewed by Denise

In this fractured retelling of The Frog Prince, when Princess Emma
kisses a frog who promises he is a prince, she doesn't get the expected
outcome. Instead of turning the frog back into a human prince, their
kiss turns Emma into a frog. The two decide that something must have
gone wrong with the spell, and so they set out on an adventure to find
the witch who originally cast the spell and get her to set things right
again. Along the way, they encounter various talking animals and sticky
situations.



I had such high hopes for this book, so when I saw a beautiful copy
in my library's donated pile, I snatched it up. I loved E.D. Baker's The
Wide-Awake Princess and Disney's adaptation of this book (The Princess
and the Frog), and after hearing such rave reviews, I was expecting to
love this book as well. I was totally disappointed.



Emma is bratty and annoying, and her prince Eadric is silly and
incompetent. Both also repeatedly put down the other. I wasn't as
bothered by this in the beginning of the book because I figured the
author was just setting the stage and through their interaction and
adventures, both characters would grow and improve. The only problem is,
the characters never improved! They actually seemed to get worse as the
story progressed, becoming even more haughty, bratty, condescending,
and useless.



Their personalities were also inconsistent, with Eadric criticizing
Emma for not thinking or for being useless and then in the next scene
he's completely useless and not thinking at all. Then he's back to being
the brains of the operation, with no explanation or logical reason for
the contradictions. Half the time Emma was annoyingly insecure, and then
she'd flip and be irritatingly haughty, then go back again to insecure.
I was even more disappointed by this because Baker's characters in The
Wide-Awake Princess were so strong and positive.



The plot itself was ok. Not offensive like the main characters, but
mostly boring and predictable. There were a few amusing scenes and side
characters, but overall both the plot and characters just don't hold up
compared to other fractured fairy tales. Maybe much younger readers are
more able to look past the flaws in characterization or the
predictability of the plot. I was bored and annoyed throughout most of
the book, but it was so short I decided to just push through and hoped I
would be rewarded in the end. I wasn't. The ending was silly and seemed
tacked on and none of the characters improved. Not recommended, but
given how much I loved The Wide-Awake Princess, I won't completely write
off E. D. Baker just yet.