Whatever After: Once Upon a Frog

By Sarah Mlynowski

Hi! Have you ever heard the fairy tale The Princess and the Frog? Well, two people named Abby and Jonah can travel into fairy tale realms using their magic mirror. And this book is the eighth book in a series and in this book, Abby and Jonah are taken to The Princess and the Frog.

It all begins in their basement where their magic mirror is. They get whisked away into the land of The Princess and the Frog. Jonah and Prince, their puppy, go first. Then Abby. Jonah and Prince land on dry land. Abby, however, lands inside the well that the princess finds the frog prince in. Jonah was trying to get his sister Abby out when along came Coco, the princess. She was practicing her ball handling skills when Prince saw the ball and got it because he loves to play fetch with balls. Princess Coco got angry at Prince and she said something to Prince that offended Abby. Abby didn’t like it when the princess scolded Prince, so she informed Princess Coco that that was her puppy. At first Princess Coco didn’t know where the voice was coming from, and then she looked in the well and saw Abby. She asked Princess Coco if she would help her get out of the well, but she wouldn’t. Instead, she got on her horse and rode away to her kingdom. That’s when Abby started to dislike Princess Coco.

While she was in the well, she met the frog prince. His real name was Frederic and he was actually a prince that was turned into a frog. But when Abby had been talking to Princess Coco, Frederic had leaped away. Jonah found a way to help Abby out of the well and they started looking for Frederic. Jonah climbed a tree so that he could see where Frederic might have gone. He said that he saw a canoe nearby and they could look for him in the water. And so they did.

They thought they saw Frederic, but it turned out to be a toad. Then, they were starting to pass over a waterfall and Jonah had forgotten the paddles. So then they fell! At the bottom of the waterfall, they found Frederic. He was working out and doing pushups on a rock. They started working on ideas to turn him back into a human based on the actual fairy tale version.

Will Frederic be saved or will he have to live the rest of his life as a frog? (And since they ruined the part of the story where the frog catches the ball as it falls into the well, there are no guarantees that this story will have a happy ending!) As I always say, read the book to find out!

I recommend this book to readers who love excitement and adventure, though you might want to read the other books in this series first.

A few helpful things I like to say about the books I read:

“Run and Get Mom” (how I describe the scariness factor):
There were zero scary parts in this book.

“Yucky-Lovey Stuff” (how I describe the romance factor):
There were a few yucky-lovey parts (like frog-kissing), but none too bad.