It is no secret to people who know me that I hoard books, maybe a little bit. We have thousands of books in our house and have given up any pretense of calling our living room anything but a library. I have an entire bookshelf in my bedroom just to house my TBR list. The acquisition of books that interest me makes me feel genuinely happy and excited about life because I cannot wait to read all those stories. Our Little Free Library might have been constructed in part to help me make peace with letting go of books now and then because we don’t live in a Tardis or have an Undetectable Extension Charm on our house (more’s the pity).

But yo, my job is not to be a Reader Just For Fun. So sometimes it takes me longer than I’d like to get around to reading books on that TBR bookshelf.

Over Spring Break, I finally read The Frog Prince by Elle Lothlorien, a novel which had sat on my TBR bookshelf for several years, enticing me with its romantic-comedy plot and not-pink cover art, and seriously, I cannot believe I waited so long to read it! I devoured it in three days and loved loved loved it!

This book is a romance, but it’s a very sweet one — meaning the main plot of the story is about an amorous relationship, but it’s not an explicit read. I would feel comfortable recommending this book to my high school students who enjoy romantic comedies.

And the comedy? I laughed so much in the first several chapters of this book that I had to put it down occasionally until I finished giggling. Lothlorien’s voice is strong and funny, and her writing style, very engaging. I will admit the book isn’t a laugh-a-minute all the way through: the comedy does dial down just a bit as we get into the thick of the plot to make way for a compelling story. The characters are fun and realistic, I genuinely cared about what was happening to them, and the writing is really good from sentence-level to narrative architecture.

This book is called The Frog Prince but it doesn’t have tons of parallels to the Grimm Brothers’ “Iron Heinrich.” (Think Naomi Novik’s Uprooted and “Beauty and the Beast.”) Lothlorien’s book is pretty original. But if you want an enjoyable romantic comedy in a modern setting with the same kind of feels as a fairy tale, this book is a good choice for you.