Disclaimer: Due to the general unavailability of many books in our local libraries, this enticing list of books will remain only a list.
A More Direct Directory:
Iron Henry from Black Thorn, White Rose.
The Princess and the Frog from The Door in the Hedge.
Analysis:
Fiction is an easier genre than poetry to capture retellings of the "Frog Prince". Picture books
often reproduce the story exactly as the Grimms told it. However, they also have a habit of
presenting entirely subversive recountings of the tale (See Frog Prince Continued.) These are
the stories that are indoctrinating our children!
"The Frog King" or "Iron Henry" is an odd tale from a collection of odd retellings of fairy
tales. It bears more similarity to the original Grimms tale than any of the others we have found.
Very few of the reinterpretations mention Iron Henry or the bounds that break around his heart.
The author takes a very common method of retelling a fairy tale, by documenting what happens
after "happily ever after."
Robin McKinley's "The Princess and the Frog" has a heroine conveniently named Rana, which
means frog in Spanish. McKinley keeps the strict fairy tale opposition between good and evil.
She is no Anne Sexton. The princess and the frog/prince work together to vanquish the evil
Aliyander. The story still resembles a fairy tale although the characters are well developed.
(The Door in the Hedge is a fantastic book, go read it!)
In Conclusion fictional adaptations, for obvious reasons, are more complete and closer to
the style of the original tales than poetry. Writers are more likely to develop a story than just
to use the motifs in fiction. Thus, there are not link connections to bad fictional representations
of the Frog Prince that we happened to find on the web.
This page produced by Ellen Goldstein for Once Upon A Time: The Frog Prince