"The Frog Prince Continued"

One book that I loved reading as a kid was "The Frog Prince Continued" by Jon Scieszka. I was and still am fascinated by the illustrations in this book that were done by Steve Johnson. For starters, the front cover says "The Frog Prince" and then slashed in red blood writing across the cover is "CONTINUED". I think the dark tones and the eerie and abstract pictures makes you really get into the story. The book starts out by showing the last page of the original "Frog Prince" story and the picture and text illustrate that the frog turned into a prince and lived with the princess and they lived happily ever after. But then Jon Scieszka tells what really happened after they were married and lived "sort of happily for a long time....Okay so they weren't so happy". In fact, the frog prince and his princess actually didn't get along very well and were very different people. I don't to explain the whole story here, but needless to say the Frog Prince goes adventuring about to try and find a way to become a frog again. I really enjoyed reading this story because it gives a different perspective, a more realistic perspective. I think children and adults appreciate this style of writing because it's interesting to see that these fantasy fictional characters are actually having real life problems and do not live in a perfect world. In this book, the author also eludes to different witches from different fairy tales throughout the story. Kids can make text to text connections as well as text to self connections in this book. And lastly, this book has an important real life theme that even adults have trouble with sometimes which is the saying that "the grass is always greener on the other side". The prince spends all this time trying to become a frog so he can live happily ever after again, when the whole time he could have been at home with his princess trying to make things better.


In this book Jon goes beyond the "normal" story of the fairy tales that we all know and love. Instead of just ending at "they lived happily ever after", Jon goes deeper and gets the real emotions and feelings that are going on inside the Frog Prince. I think this attracts readers because we want to know what really happened, and not just some fantasy that has the perfect ending. (Even though at the end of this book the frog prince and princess do live happily ever after, however as frogs! ....does this mean that the woman had to change into a frog to make the frog prince happy?)