Set in 1937 during the so-called “Roosevelt recession,” tight times compel Mary Alice, a Chicago girl, to move in with her grandmother, who lives in a tiny Illinois town so behind the times that it doesn’t “even have a picture show.” 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. 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. 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. 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. Desperate for any alternative to a forced marriage, Princess Emma nerves herself to kiss a talking frog-and turns into one herself. Taking a princess’s-eye view, Baker reworks the traditional story into high-spirited romantic comedy.
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