Deep Desires Press, $4.99, ISBN 978-0463268537
Fantasy Romance, 2019
Minna Louche’s The Frozen Prince is a nice amalgamation of popular fairy tale tropes.
We have two Disney princesses, a real princess called Malaya and her servant girl best friend Genevieve.
When the dreaded Frozen Prince storms in to seize Malaya’s hand in marriage one fine day, regardless of whether the lady is willing, Genevieve has Malaya switch dresses with her. That way, she gets kidnapped in her friend’s place.
Genevieve’s foster father, the court jester, decides to go rescue her, and Malaya decides to tag along, because it will be rude to inconvenient the Frozen Prince by making the latter leave his scary demesne one more time to catch his quarry. Malaya’s father sends some of her suitors to go rescue her, promising her hand in marriage to whichever bloke that succeeds.
Meanwhile, the Frozen Prince is what he is because of supposedly dark bargain he made to avenge his parents when the people revolted and executed them, blah blah, and his heart is a wound that will never heal, wah wah—still, he’s hot, so that means him cute, I suppose.
Oh yes, there is everything here that can be reminiscent of other popular fairy tales, but to give the author credit, everything here is put together very well in an intriguing and very readable manner.
Genevieve and Malaya have a nice camaraderie going, and these two are likable leading ladies. In many ways, this story feels like a Disney princess tale mostly done right.
Mostly, that is. The characters in this story have a distressing tendency to run headlong to the source of their problems. If this were to be a cartoon, the second half has a tendency to resemble a Looney Tunes one a little too much for my liking!
On the other hand, the prose is very easy and nice to read, with a vivid sense of description and atmosphere to make the setting feel real to me. The conversations also flow naturally without too many too-modern sounding English vernacular to pull me out of a scene.
I still don’t know why this is marketed as a romance, though. The frozen prince fellow is barely a presence for a romance hero, and I have no idea why Genevieve would fall for this fellow. It’s as if the romance happened because the author believes that the reader would be expecting it; it sure doesn’t seem to develop organically. Honestly, I’d rather this one to have the Frozen Prince be the villain, and let the two gals end up either without being in a romance or in a romance with someone, anyone else.
The fact that this one ends with a scene of that “romance” has me closing this one with a sniff of disdain instead of a content sigh.
Still, it’s a pretty interesting read in many ways, so this one is alright with me.
