What do you think?
Rate this book
The Frog Prince
This is a version of the fairy tale story of the princess and the frog prince. It tells of a promise lightly made but reluctantly kept, of enchantment, endurance and love.
32 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2002
2 people are currently reading
243 people want to read
About the author
Jan Ormerod
153 books20 followersJan Ormerod grew up in the small towns of Western Australia, with three older sisters, and as a child she drew constantly and compulsively. She went to art school and studied drawing, painting and sculpture. After completing her degree, Jan become an Associate of the Western Australian Institute of Technology and Design in Education, taught in secondary schools on enrichment programmes, and lectured in teacher’s college and art schools. Jan's first picture book, "Sunshine", won the Mother Goose Award in 1982 and was highly commended for the Kate Greenaway Medal. Her recent titles include "Ben Goes Swimming", "Emily Dances", "Who’s Who on Our Street?", " A Twist in the Tail" and "Ponko and the South Pole".
http://www.walkerbooks.com.au/authors...
http://www.walkerbooks.com.au/authors...
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 4, 2022
Entertainingly and simply told, and with excellent illustrations.
November 18, 2014
This is a great classic fairy tale that people of all ages can read and enjoy. This story shows the amazing worth of a timeless tale of a frog that turns into a prince after the kiss of a brave princess, that is looking fore her happy ending. I always love telling this story to young girls, because they all squirm at the thought of kissing a frog, but they love that the princess found her prince charming in the long run. Jan Ormerod does a great job telling the classic tale, and the illustrations of this book is phenomenal. They definitely grab the attention of their young audience with their vast far away castles, and extravagant gowns, and just the reminiscing of the days of knights in shining armor and prince charming always grab the attentions of hopeful little girls who also fantasize of finding their prince charming one day, well maybe not in a frog though. This is a timeless tale that will continue to be told for many generations to come.
August 31, 2025
#Binge Reviewing My Previous Reads #Classic fairy tales with Modern Implications
Jan Ormerod’s The Frog Prince is ostensibly a children’s tale—innocent, simple, whimsical—but like all fairy tales that have endured, it hides a machinery of meaning beneath the apparent surface. Ormerod takes the well-known Brothers Grimm story of transformation, desire, and disgust, and renders it anew with illustrations and textual rhythm that evoke both intimacy and unease. In her retelling, the frog is not merely a suitor trapped in slimy skin; he becomes the emblem of the uncanny—the Other who intrudes into the familiar, demanding recognition and intimacy when the heroine least wants it.
Reading Ormerod’s version in a postmodern light, one finds a parable not just of romance but of relational negotiation, bodily boundaries, and the nature of promises. The princess’s revulsion at the frog can be read as society’s reflexive rejection of alterity—the refusal to see value in what feels repulsive, strange, or unclean. The frog, persistently pressing his claim—“You promised”—operates as both an ethical force and a parasitic invader. It’s hard not to hear, in that insistence, echoes of social contracts that individuals are coerced into fulfilling: marriage expectations, gender roles, debts of honor, and all the subtle compulsions that script our interactions long before we can consent.
Ormerod’s illustrations amplify this tension. The frog’s grotesque yet oddly endearing visage inhabits a liminal space between cartoon charm and nightmare fuel. He is not the noble beast of Disney-fied cuteness, nor the purely sinister pest of darker renditions, but something in-between—ambiguous, hard to categorize, and both pathetic and insistent. That ambiguity is key: postmodernism thrives in dismantling binaries, and Ormerod gives us a frog who is neither villain nor hero, but a figure that destabilizes the princess’s (and our) certainties about desire, disgust, and transformation.
One can also read the tale through the lens of performativity. Judith Butler’s ideas on gender resonate here: the princess, bound by her role, resists intimacy with the frog not simply out of personal distaste but out of the scripts imposed on her. What does it mean, after all, for a princess to kiss a frog? It disrupts the order of courtly propriety, violating the neat lines of beauty, nobility, and decorum.
Yet the “happy ending” requires precisely this violation. Transformation arrives not through passive waiting but through the active—though initially reluctant—act of contact, of acknowledging the repulsive Other.
In this light, the frog is not only a suitor but also a metaphor for the repressed: the unacceptable parts of the psyche that demand integration. Ormerod’s retelling emphasizes the princess’s disgust, making the kiss (or, in some versions, the violent act of hurling the frog against the wall) an almost cathartic breakthrough. In Jungian terms, this is the moment of shadow encounter—the acceptance or confrontation of what one has disavowed. In psychoanalytic terms, it is an enactment of ambivalence, where desire and aversion collapse into the same gesture.
There is also a political allegory to be unearthed. The frog’s persistence, his appeal to contractual obligation, mirrors the workings of law and power. Promises bind, whether made under duress or naivety.
The princess cannot wriggle free because the system—the king, the law, the “word given”—enforces her compliance. The kiss then is not merely personal redemption but the price of social obligation. That she emerges “rewarded” with a prince suggests the fairytale’s ideological sleight-of-hand: what begins as coercion is reframed as destiny. The narrative reconciles the violence of forced intimacy with the fantasy of romantic fulfillment, masking the dissonance beneath the glitter of “happily ever after.”
Postmodern critique allows us to resist that closure. We can interrogate whether the frog’s transformation is a genuine emancipation or merely another cycle of patriarchal reinforcement. Does the princess truly gain freedom, or is she simply transferred from one form of subjugation (promise to a frog) to another (marriage to a prince)? Ormerod’s illustrations don’t fully resolve this—they allow enough slippage for irony, enough strangeness for the reader to question whether the ending is as tidy as tradition insists.
Ultimately, Jan Ormerod’s The Frog Prince is more than a pretty retelling. It is a text about contracts—between self and other, child and adult, disgust and desire, story and reader. It dramatises the instability of transformation itself: how do we know when change is genuine, and when it is merely the reassertion of old hierarchies under new guises? In presenting us with a frog who is insistently Other and a princess who is reluctantly bound, Ormerod ensures the fairy tale remains both unsettling and fertile ground for reinterpretation. Like the amphibian itself, the story thrives in the in-between spaces, slippery and moist, neither fully land nor water, neither wholly innocent nor entirely corrupt.
To read The Frog Prince now, in an age where we question every institution—from marriage to monarchy, from gender roles to social contracts—is to see in its slimy folds a mirror of our own anxieties.
The frog croaks still, insistent, unsettling, a reminder that the Other we most resist may be the one we most need to confront.
Jan Ormerod’s The Frog Prince is ostensibly a children’s tale—innocent, simple, whimsical—but like all fairy tales that have endured, it hides a machinery of meaning beneath the apparent surface. Ormerod takes the well-known Brothers Grimm story of transformation, desire, and disgust, and renders it anew with illustrations and textual rhythm that evoke both intimacy and unease. In her retelling, the frog is not merely a suitor trapped in slimy skin; he becomes the emblem of the uncanny—the Other who intrudes into the familiar, demanding recognition and intimacy when the heroine least wants it.
Reading Ormerod’s version in a postmodern light, one finds a parable not just of romance but of relational negotiation, bodily boundaries, and the nature of promises. The princess’s revulsion at the frog can be read as society’s reflexive rejection of alterity—the refusal to see value in what feels repulsive, strange, or unclean. The frog, persistently pressing his claim—“You promised”—operates as both an ethical force and a parasitic invader. It’s hard not to hear, in that insistence, echoes of social contracts that individuals are coerced into fulfilling: marriage expectations, gender roles, debts of honor, and all the subtle compulsions that script our interactions long before we can consent.
Ormerod’s illustrations amplify this tension. The frog’s grotesque yet oddly endearing visage inhabits a liminal space between cartoon charm and nightmare fuel. He is not the noble beast of Disney-fied cuteness, nor the purely sinister pest of darker renditions, but something in-between—ambiguous, hard to categorize, and both pathetic and insistent. That ambiguity is key: postmodernism thrives in dismantling binaries, and Ormerod gives us a frog who is neither villain nor hero, but a figure that destabilizes the princess’s (and our) certainties about desire, disgust, and transformation.
One can also read the tale through the lens of performativity. Judith Butler’s ideas on gender resonate here: the princess, bound by her role, resists intimacy with the frog not simply out of personal distaste but out of the scripts imposed on her. What does it mean, after all, for a princess to kiss a frog? It disrupts the order of courtly propriety, violating the neat lines of beauty, nobility, and decorum.
Yet the “happy ending” requires precisely this violation. Transformation arrives not through passive waiting but through the active—though initially reluctant—act of contact, of acknowledging the repulsive Other.
In this light, the frog is not only a suitor but also a metaphor for the repressed: the unacceptable parts of the psyche that demand integration. Ormerod’s retelling emphasizes the princess’s disgust, making the kiss (or, in some versions, the violent act of hurling the frog against the wall) an almost cathartic breakthrough. In Jungian terms, this is the moment of shadow encounter—the acceptance or confrontation of what one has disavowed. In psychoanalytic terms, it is an enactment of ambivalence, where desire and aversion collapse into the same gesture.
There is also a political allegory to be unearthed. The frog’s persistence, his appeal to contractual obligation, mirrors the workings of law and power. Promises bind, whether made under duress or naivety.
The princess cannot wriggle free because the system—the king, the law, the “word given”—enforces her compliance. The kiss then is not merely personal redemption but the price of social obligation. That she emerges “rewarded” with a prince suggests the fairytale’s ideological sleight-of-hand: what begins as coercion is reframed as destiny. The narrative reconciles the violence of forced intimacy with the fantasy of romantic fulfillment, masking the dissonance beneath the glitter of “happily ever after.”
Postmodern critique allows us to resist that closure. We can interrogate whether the frog’s transformation is a genuine emancipation or merely another cycle of patriarchal reinforcement. Does the princess truly gain freedom, or is she simply transferred from one form of subjugation (promise to a frog) to another (marriage to a prince)? Ormerod’s illustrations don’t fully resolve this—they allow enough slippage for irony, enough strangeness for the reader to question whether the ending is as tidy as tradition insists.
Ultimately, Jan Ormerod’s The Frog Prince is more than a pretty retelling. It is a text about contracts—between self and other, child and adult, disgust and desire, story and reader. It dramatises the instability of transformation itself: how do we know when change is genuine, and when it is merely the reassertion of old hierarchies under new guises? In presenting us with a frog who is insistently Other and a princess who is reluctantly bound, Ormerod ensures the fairy tale remains both unsettling and fertile ground for reinterpretation. Like the amphibian itself, the story thrives in the in-between spaces, slippery and moist, neither fully land nor water, neither wholly innocent nor entirely corrupt.
To read The Frog Prince now, in an age where we question every institution—from marriage to monarchy, from gender roles to social contracts—is to see in its slimy folds a mirror of our own anxieties.
The frog croaks still, insistent, unsettling, a reminder that the Other we most resist may be the one we most need to confront.
March 23, 2018
Love Jan Omerod's work! Interesting to see how she combines her original comic-strip style layouts with a style similar to art-nouveau-era illustrator greats like Dulac or Rackham. Love the paneling and subplots in the borders.
March 15, 2015
This book is terrifying! I can't believe I read it to my innocent daughter! I hope she did not understand any part of it - what trash! How horrid!
September 5, 2017
I think everyone knows the story of The Frog Prince, while not a favorite of mine, I did love the illustrations in this book. The art work was beautiful, reminded me of old style painted window panes.
February 23, 2025
This is a picture book retelling of the fairy tale “The Frog Prince.”
October 3, 2025
Lovely little book. Beautifully illustrated too.
I always enjoy a fairytale from the Brothers Grimm.
I always enjoy a fairytale from the Brothers Grimm.
December 7, 2014
Jan Ormerod was an Australian illustrator of children's books. I can see the Australian colors and designs in her illustrations. Her work was noted for its ability to remove clutter to tell a simple story that young children could enjoy, employing flat color’s and clean lines. Jan Ormerod really grabs the attention of her readers through her story telling and illustrations. The frog prince is a great and enjoyable style of the frog prince fairy tale. The story picks up with a fairy tale page that ends the normal frog prince story and from there goes on to the unhappy prince and princess. The imagery is rather dark but intriguing and interesting to look at. The story brings many classic Disney villains/witches and characters into the story. It also tells the frog prince's unfortunate story. The best part of the book is the almost mocking comedy Jan Ormerod provides. The ending is so good with the prince kissing the princess and turning them both into frogs. I really enjoyed reading this book.
April 27, 2009
Retelling of the Frog Prince fairy tale. Queen forces princess to keep her promise to the frog. Frog spends three nights with princess before her hatred turns to love. Frog's transformation is acrobatic. No mention of Iron Henry. Dark haired princess wears white gown throughout the book. Illustrations: Beautifully done in muted shades of greens, browns, and grays. Occasional yellows or reds.Great detail in the borders.
Read
April 26, 2016This book tells the classic fairytale of the princess who falls in love for the prince frog. The one thing that really stood out was how beautiful and well-put together the illustrations of the book. I would recommend this for early elementary (k-2).
May 19, 2011
Nice pictures but not a big hit with my three year old.
January 2, 2023
Nothing like what I’m familiar with. I thought the story was interesting.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews