Frogged

Product Information

Vande Velde's (The Rumpelstiltskin Problem, reviewed above) fairy tale-like novel set once upon a time features two witches, 17-year-old Nola and her mother. Imogene then journey's to the worst witch conversationalist ever and then gets kidnapped to work in a traveling theater by two witless teenagers - Luella and Bertie - who don't believe a talking frog when she tells them she's a princess under a spell. This non-linear narrative jumps back and forth in time, as you get to know the women of the North family: Hazel, her daughters, Miriam and August, and Miriam’s daughter, Joan. Anyone who reads my reviews knows I do not like flowery writing with an abundance of descriptive writing, often described as “poetic”.

FROGGED | Kirkus Reviews

Family secrets withheld for generations are unfurled, the traumas endured shared which allows each generation to understand the one that came before a little better. Each chapter of Frogged is titled after a chapter in The Art of Being a Princes, with a sarcastic subtitle by Imogene herself.The story of a Black family from Memphis whose story is shared through some of the most lovely prose I’ve found in a debut, a story so heartfelt, with so much heartbreak, but also love. The 30+ sections then range as far back as 1937 (when Hazel was 16) and as far forward as 2003 (when Derek’s gang involvement leads to his imprisonment). Now she's stuck as a frog until she can get someone else to kiss her, but Princess Imogene feels bad about tricking anyone the way Harry tricked her. even though there were characters that were 80 and characters that were 8, there was no difference in the way they thought or spoke or described things that happened.

Frogged by Vivian Vande Velde | Goodreads

Using a style that has become more familiar of late, the author moves back and forth in time, using Hazel, Miriam, August, and Joan as her narrators, to present pivotal moments and events within the family and their world. Through their lives, we see much of the joy and sadness of the past century and the promise for the future.This book was ok, but it bears a striking resemblance to the book "Tales of A Frog Princess", and not in the best way. Two narrators give more believability to the voicing of the characters and with the constant shifting between timelines, it gives clearer distinction between the main character's voices. The climactic confrontation pits oceangoing mammals, seabirds, fish, and even zooplankton against hardware and technology in a nicely choreographed battle. What ultimately for me really rather detracted from the novel (which is very strongly conceived and well if not spectacularly written) was the rather high levels of melodrama – it feels like all the characters are permanently moving from one crisis to another in a way which took this away from the level of literary fiction and closer to soap opera, while also diluting the impact of the individual events. Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group- The Dial Press for an egalley in exchange for an honest review.

Frogged - Velde, Vande, Vivian: 9780544225466 - AbeBooks

Vande Velde previously reworked classic fairy tales in The Rumpelstiltskin Problem and Tales from the Brothers Grimm and the Sisters Weird, and she now turns to the “The Frog Prince.Princess Imogene is preparing for her thirteenth birthday and being transformed from a loud, rude, tom-boy to a real princess. Listen, this is not a bad novel, but it is so conventional and predictable and exactly what you would expect to find on a generic Women's Prize list. By concentrating, she could make out what the frogs were saying, and that was when she realized their language only had a few words. I loved Hazel for finding a love like no other, loved Miriam for finding the strength to leave an abusive situation and redefine herself, loved August for making the choice to be there for a son she could never control rather than follow her own dreams, loved June for ignoring the noise that tried to make her stop drawing and loved Maya for never letting outside voices temper her love for her father and her family.

Frogged by Vivian Vande Velde - Publishers Weekly

Stringfellow’s debut novel Memphis (Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House) is a multi-generational bildungsroman based on the author’s rich Civil Rights history. It’s a story that moves back and forth across the decades from World War II to the war in Afghanistan following the struggles of three generations of resilient Black women…. Over time, frogging become more and more decorative, rather than practical, as is evident in the 1860 jacket worn by Captain John Grant Malcolmson (Fig. How they weather these tragedies, how they maintain their hopes and dreams of better things and do it together, is the story.Touching its corners, I thought then about all that had passed in the eight years since we arrived in Memphis. No book can stand up to the hype of Bookstagram and I think this is why I felt so underwhelmed reading it. Her journey proves to prepare her more for young womanhood and becoming a princess than the words of the book given to her by her mother; The Art of Being a Princess. Photographed in 1895, Winston Churchill, who would later serve as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, can be seen wearing a frogged military jacket (Fig. This is character-driven novel, which I love, but in this case, I wish it had a bit more plot to drive the story forward.