THE FROG PRINCESS

Taking a princess’s-eye view, Baker reworks the traditional story into high-spirited romantic comedy. Desperate for any alternative to a forced marriage, Princess Emma nerves herself to kiss a talking frog—and turns into one herself. As curses can only be removed by the witch who casts them, Emma and glib new acquaintance Prince Eadric of Upper Montevista set out to hunt her up. Fraught with dangers and punctuated with droll interludes as Emma struggles to get the hang of her new limbs and tongue, this shared quest is, naturally, just the ticket for cementing a close relationship. Boastful, libidinous, tender of ego, reckless, and unable to look beyond the next meal, Eadric is less archetypal hero than typical specimen of inept male, but he does have a good heart, and by the time the two achieve human form again, Emma will have no other—for a friend, that is: marriage will have to wait until she finishes a course in witchcraft. Like Donna Jo Napoli’s Prince of the Pond (1992), this gives the well-known folktale a decidedly less than “Grimm” cast, and fans of Gail Carson Levine’s “Princess Tales” should leap for it. (Fiction. 11-13)