I’ve been sitting on this review for a while since the author pulled the book to re-release it. Now that it’s back up, I can finally review it.
It’s a pretty basic retelling of the Frog Prince story. A prince, Nolan, is turned into a frog. But this time it’s voluntary, mostly because he’s got an arranged marriage with Princess Blythe from the neighboring kingdom and all of her letters to him are boring, dull, and dreadful. He fears that he won’t like her and she won’t like him. So of course the best way to find out about his intended is to turn himself into a frog.
Because reasons.
To say this book is slow to start is underselling it. Like it’s molasses on a cold day in Antarctica slow. It took me over three months to reach the 30% mark where the story picks up. If I didn’t love this fairytale I probably would have put this down long before I reached the point where the story got good.
There’s infodump. Nolan is not likeable initially. And neither is Blythe. Seriously, the only reason I finished this and didn’t dnf it was because I needed something non-triggering after a spate of contemporary stuff with rape as drama. It’s that slow and tedious.
I really liked the characters once the story got going. The scenes of them getting to know each other and slowly falling in love were cute. But there weren’t enough of them. I felt we missed the whole swaths of their courtship with a sentence of three months later.
It was like the author realized that she spent all of her time in backstory and needed to hurry to the end.
The ending was rushed, like really rushed. Super duper rushed. Like I was surprised it was ending.
And there was a ton of info dump at the end to sort of wrap up everything.
I’m not the biggest fan of the premise which had the main male character go essentially under cover and impersonate someone else while the main female character has no idea about his duplicity. It’s hard to come back from.
But I didn’t hate this book. It wasn’t horrid. It wasn’t great. It had some good features and some really bad ones. In the end, I felt kind of Meh about it.
Three stars.
You can get the book here.
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