Princess Anya must go on a Quest, not a little quest, a big one with a capital Q!

Her stepstepfather is the evil sorcerer, Duke Rikard, intent on ruling the tiny kingdom of Trellonia. Having turned her older sister’s current courting prince into a frog, Anya makes a sister’s promise to find the ingredients to make a lip balm to restore him. Then, the Duke announces his plans to have Princess Anya sent far far away to school, and her Quest becomes a whole lot bigger…

Filled with fairytale folk, transmogrified animals and magic, this is a pacey adventure for anyone who loves their fairytales with a twist.

Great for fans of A Tale Dark and Grimm, The Fairytale Detectives and Land of Stories.

ARC provided by Netgalley in return for an honest review.

This was such a magical, fun, romp of a book!

It reminded me of the most wonderful Diana Wynne Jones (and she did receive an honourable mention at the end), and that can never be a bad thing!

This book follows princess Anya and her trusty Royal dog Ardent as they embark on a quest to turn a frog back into a (kind of dumb) prince.
But their quest somehow keeps managing to get bigger and bigger until Anya has taken on a whole host of other quests and promises too.

I absolutely LOVED how many strong, awesome female characters there were in this book!

First we have Anya herself, who starts out as a kind of typical selfish princess who would much rather stay home and curl up in the library all day rather than help people.
(I would totally be this type of princess!)
Yet as we go through the story she grows so much as a person and learns many valuable life lessons and ends up as a pretty damn awesome princess!

We also have a female Good Wizard (sometimes complete with long, white beard), an evil female sorcerer, female members of The Seven Dwarves, a group of tricksy witches, a totally badass female Knight and many more!

YAS!!

The only problem I had with this book was that I wish our questing group had visited more places in this magical world.
I did feel a bit disappointed that most (though not all) of the objects they were questing for were conveniently obtained in one place.
I wanted them to have to have an adventure to get each one separately!
I wanted MORE questing!

But other than that small, kind of greedy complaint on my part, this was a very fun, magical read.

I hope we get to see what happens to Anya and the kingdom of Trallonia next!