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What happened after the princess kissed the frog and turned him into a prince? In 1991 Jon Scieszka wrote a children's book describing how the strange couple lived, and it's not happily ever after. "Stop sticking your tongue out like that," the Princess nags. And the Prince complains that he never gets to visit the pond any more...

The first illustration looks like a wedding invitation, with the happy couple drawn on yellow parchment, the prince wearing a green business suit and the princess wearing a pink dress and pearls like a 1950s homemaker. The Princess brushes her hair in the mirror - and in its reflection, the prince is seen hopping to the ceiling. That's one of the princess's complaints: that he keeps hopping on the furniture. It's a funny book, and the illustrations by Steve Johnson make it even funnier.

The princess suggests her husband should engage in a more princely activity, like slaying a big dragon. Or maybe he could just slay a giant. But "The Prince didn't feel like going out and slaying anything," Scieszka notes wryly. In the middle of an argument, the princess quips that they were better off when he was a frog. And the prince hightails it for the woods - looking for his witch to see if she can turn him into a frog yet again!

Jon Scieszka enjoys skewering the classic fairy tales. (In 1989 he wrote "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs," in which the wolf explains it was all a crazy misunderstanding.) And in this book, the prince hurries through the woods, encountering all of the witches from other fairy tales along the way. There's the witch from Sleeping Beauty and the witch from Snow White, and at a candy-covered house there's the witch from Hansel and Gretel. She promises that she can help him, if he'll just come inside..."for lunch."

And the drawings contain their own jokes, like children's illustrations crossed with a parody drawn by Mad magazine. They're slick and colorful, bringing the fairy tales to life, but they'll often hide subtle extra jokes. Hansel and Gretel's witch has a garden where she plants...ice cream cones into the soil. And Snow White's witch is reading a beauty magazine, but it isn't Vogue - it's "Hague." Soon the prince encounters Cinderella's fairy godmother, and she's practicing how to turn pumpkins into magical carriages. In the funniest drawing of all, she zaps the prince with her wand, and he's no longer a prince.

Now he's a carriage.

Learn more about this author, Moe Zilla.
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