Book Review: The Frog Princess
Oct. 10th, 2011 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerJust finished E. D. Baker's The Frog Princess. What a dull, underperforming, and unromantic novel. The title makes the ending basically inevitable - obviously the book will end with the heroine and her frog planning their wedding! - but I had almost convinced myself it wasn't going to happen because the leads have nothing that might be mistaken for chemistry (not least because they have very little that might be mistaken for personality, either).
The hero's affection for the heroine is mostly limited to inappropriate and ineffective bursts of protectiveness, alternating with continued solicitation of make-out session, which the heroine always rejects as "Gross!" She never says anything to suggest she's changed her mind about this until the second to last page, or indeed does anything to suggest more than a transient fondness for him.
But so what if there's no textual evidence for mutual affection? It's a frog princess story! They have to get married! I'm suddenly remembering why I hated romantic subplots so vividly when I was twelve!
How Disney got from this book to The Princess and the Frog, which may have its problems but is at least possessed of interesting characters who have a cute romance in the midst of an exciting plot, I can't imagine. No, wait, I totally can. The movie bears NO RESEMBLANCE TO THE BOOK WHATSOEVER, that's how.
The hero's affection for the heroine is mostly limited to inappropriate and ineffective bursts of protectiveness, alternating with continued solicitation of make-out session, which the heroine always rejects as "Gross!" She never says anything to suggest she's changed her mind about this until the second to last page, or indeed does anything to suggest more than a transient fondness for him.
But so what if there's no textual evidence for mutual affection? It's a frog princess story! They have to get married! I'm suddenly remembering why I hated romantic subplots so vividly when I was twelve!
How Disney got from this book to The Princess and the Frog, which may have its problems but is at least possessed of interesting characters who have a cute romance in the midst of an exciting plot, I can't imagine. No, wait, I totally can. The movie bears NO RESEMBLANCE TO THE BOOK WHATSOEVER, that's how.
