Literature / Whatever After

The cover for the boxset of books 1-6.

"Once upon a time my life was normal. Then the mirror in our basement ate us."

—Abby, prologue of Fairest of All

Whatever After is a series of books targeted towards children written by Sarah Mlynowski, following siblings Abby and Jonah and their wacky misadventures as they travel various fairy tales (that happen to be fractured versions, too!) After moving from Chicago to the town of Smithville, a change that Abby absolutely hates, the siblings find a mysterious mirror in the basement of their new house. Upon knocking on it three times at midnight, the mirror sucks them up and transports them into a different fairy tale every book, of which they need to find their way out of.

Wait a second. This is a fiction book, so according to Rule of Drama, something has to go wrong. Which is exactly what happens. Somehow, the siblings end up messing up the fairy tales in some way every time, and they need to turn everything back the way it was before finding their way home. This usually does not end up well. Usually, the fairy tales do get fixed and do get their Happily Ever After in the end, but almost all of the essential plot details have been rewritten.

The books in this series as of now are:

• Book 1: Whatever After: Fairest of All
• Book 2: Whatever After: If The Shoe Fits
• Book 3: Whatever After: Sink or Swim
• Book 4: Whatever After: Dream On
• Book 5: Whatever After: Bad Hair Day
• Book 6: Whatever After: Cold As Ice
• Book 7: Whatever After: Beauty Queen
• Book 8: Whatever After: Once Upon a Frog
• Book 9: Whatever After: Genie in a Bottle
• Book 10: Whatever After: Sugar and Spice
• Special 1: Whatever After: Abby in Wonderland
• Book 11: Whatever After: Two Peas in a Pod
• Book 12: Whatever After: Seeing Red
• Book 13: Whatever After: Spill the Beans
• Special 2: Whatever After: Abby in Oz
• Book 14: Whatever After: Good as Gold
• Book 15: Whatever After: Just Dance
• Short Story:^note Accessible by purchasing the audiobook of Best Wishes Whatever After: Go Fetch
• Special 3: Whatever After: Abby in Neverland
• Book 16: Whatever After: Liar, Liar

Tropes found in Whatever After:

• Action Survivor: Abby and Jonah repeatedly go up against some of the greatest fairy tale villains of all time and survive using nothing more than their wits.
• Alternate History: Brownies don’t exist in Cinderella’s universe. Because Abby likes to have Added Alliterative Appeal, she calls brownies "crownies" so that Cinderella's brownie shop can be named "Cinderella's Crownies".
• Amnesia Episode: Due to accidentally getting exposed to Maryrose's Laser-Guided Amnesia in the previous book, Jonah spends the book Beauty Queen with no recollection of his adventures in fairy tales with his sister. Abby tries multiple different ways to restore Jonah's erased memories, but nothing she does works. By the end of the book, Jonah regained all his lost memories thanks to a magical yo-yo.
• An Aesop: Life often changes in ways you don't expect, but it's important to be open-minded and make the most of any situation. Strive for an outcome even better than if your life went exactly as planned.
• Art Evolution: The covers of the first two books have simple solid-colored backgrounds, while later covers are significantly more detailed when it comes to scenery.
• Artistic License – Animal Care: Prince can eat all human foods easily. In Sugar and Spice, he helped Abby and Jonah eat through a wall of candy without any issue.
• Artistic License – Physics: In Good As Gold, Abby, Jonah, and Prince sled down a snowy mountainside riding an upside-down skateboard, which is unrealistic on so many levels.
  • According to Abby, the skateboard was going at 200 miles per hour. Even in professional bobsledding or luge events, speeds rarely exceed 90 miles per hour. Sledding at 200 miles per hour is not only extremely dangerous but almost impossible, especially with a skateboard not even designed for snow transportation to begin with. However, Abby may have exaggerated about this because she is a notorious Unreliable Narrator. Still, she did want to get the point across that the skateboard was fast.
  • Skateboards are designed for smooth surfaces and do not have the necessary features to navigate snowy terrain. And since the skateboard is used upside down, the curved ends point downward instead of up. This would increase drag because the entire surface of the skateboard doesn't firmly touch the ground.
  • They then crash into the Three Bears' house and break through the door in the process. Doors are built to withstand impact, so the skateboard would break and the kids would smash face-first into the door.
  • The worst offender of all: They survive all of this. They survive crashing into a door at 200 miles per hour. They should have died from an impact like that, or maybe severe injuries if they're lucky.
• Audience Surrogate: Jonah has little knowledge of fairy tales outside of the Disney versions. This is so Abby has a way to explain to kids reading how the original stories go.
• Big Bad: Gluck, an evil fairy who trapped Maryrose inside the Magic Mirror forever.
• Big Eater: Mr. Beast has to eat six meals a day due to his curse. Abby also experiences this symptom after being transformed.
• Big Good: Maryrose, the benevolent fairy inside the Magic Mirror.
• Big Sister Instinct: Abby is very protective of Jonah, and does everything she can to make sure he doesn't find trouble in their fairy tale journeys.
• Bizarre Taste in Food: Jonah characteristically loves ketchup to the point where he enjoys it with literally any food. This includes foods Abby deems inappropriate to eat with ketchup, such as sweet foods.
  • In Fairest Of All, Jonah was the only one who liked Snow's gross stew that everyone else hated.
• Bloodless Carnage: Slightly downplayed. During the climax of Fairest Of All, Evil Evelyn shoots an arrow at Prince Trevor, which lodges itself in his chest. When Prince Trevor falls into the moat and Snow tries to carry her, the narration describes his condition as simply "The bleeding Prince Trevor". However, when Trevor is hauled to dry land and has the arrow dislodged from his chest, the narration doesn't explicitly describe him with a puncture wound, let alone any blood. It simply describes how he's not breathing and his eyes are closed.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: At one point in Abby in Wonderland, Penny uses Abby's "Crumbs" catchphrase, annoying the latter.
• Brick Joke: At the start of Abby in Wonderland, Frankie teaches Abby how to feign lip-syncing by repeatedly mouthing the word "watermelon". Near the end of the book, Abby encounters a jar of baby powder and notes that it smells like watermelon. This is a subtle reference to Frankie's Lame Rhyme Dodge technique briefly mentioned at the start of the book.
• Brother–Sister Team: Abby and Jonah are siblings and go into the fairy tales together.
• Cassandra Truth: Near the end of Cold As Ice, Abby and Jonah tell their parents the truth about where they have been at night. Their parents obviously don't believe their claims of travelling in fairy tale dimensions. That is, not until Abby and Jonah prove it by showing the Magic Mirror.
• Cheer Up Episode: Some books have Abby go to a fairy tale to cheer up after a disappointment in her real life. One example of this is in Bad Hair Day, after she loses her school Spelling Bee.
• Covers Always Lie: The book covers often depict scenes that don't exist in the actual books. This is usually due to the covers portraying Abby in the place of an existing fairy tale character. For example, the cover of If The Shoe Fits depicts Abby trying on the glass slipper as if she were Cinderella.
• Crossover: The fairy tale of Good as Gold is a combination of both Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Rumpelstiltskin. This two-in-one fairy tale was caused after Jonah accidentally cracked the mirror and tampered with its magic.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Abby is so used to introducing herself and her brother to fairy tale characters that in Just Dance, she almost accidentally introduces Jonah to the princesses while Jonah is hiding under an Invisibility Cloak.
• Decomposite Character: Dream On splits the evil fairy from Sleeping Beauty into Carlotta (the elderly fairy who cursed Sleeping Beauty to prick her finger on a spinning wheel in the first place) and Lottie (Carlotta's daughter who actually tries to carry out the curse).
• Delayed Reaction: Abby has an extremely delayed one in Fairest of All. It being the middle of the night over in their world, she hasn’t fully come to her senses and doesn’t realize at first that she’s standing in front of the one and only Snow White of all people, still thinking she’s back at Smithville and not in a fairy tale. Jonah immediately does, however, and has to give her a quick refresh of the story before she can realize this.
• Department of Redundancy Department: In Two Peas In A Pod, there's this exchange:
  Jonah: I'm guessing there are no swamps in Jack and the Beanstalk?
  Abby: I don't think so. Sorry.
  Jonah: But at least now I know what story we ARE in!
  Abby: Which one?
  Jonah: The one that has a swamp in it!
  Abby: Oh, THAT one.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Prince the dog is depicted as predominantly white with small bits of brown on covers. In the first few books since he was introduced, Abby described him as just brown. Later books corrected this case of Covers Always Lie, now describing Prince as both brown and white.
• Easy Amnesia: Averted. Jonah’s memories of their fairy tale adventures accidentally got wiped at the end of Cold As Ice. The next book shows that Abby has spent the past week desperately trying to get Jonah to regain his memories, but to no avail. Even when Jonah goes into a fairy tale, he still doesn’t remember anything, and it isn’t until the end of the book when he finally regained them.
• Exact Words: Near the end of Dream On, Lottie reverses Robin's curse to sleep for a hundred years, but Robin still doesn't wake up. This is because the original curse would be broken after a hundred years AND after the victim is kissed by a prince. Lottie didn't specifically reverse that part of the spell. However, Abby and Jonah name their new dog Prince, and Robin finally wakes up while Prince is licking her.
• Eye of Newt: One of the ingredients required for an underwater-breathing Magic Potion is a mermaid's spit.
• Fang Thpeak: In Beauty Queen when Abby is turned into a beast, she grows fangs that cause her to lisp.
• First-Person Smartass: The series is narrated in First-Person Perspective with Abby as the point of view, where she frequently has Inner Monologue commentary with a Deadpan Snarker attitude.
• Floral Theme Naming: Frau Gothel's animals are named after different kinds of herbs and spices, such as Basil the horse, Cinnamon the aardvark, and Pepper the parrot.
• Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: Jonah is a big mischief maker and always seems to be getting into trouble, while Abby likes planning things out and is always either pulling Jonah out of sticky situations or bossing him around.
• Forced Transformation:
  • Some of the fairy tales the siblings go into already feature this trope.
  • Abby, Jonah, and Cinderella get turned into mice.
  • Abby gets turned into a beast.
• Formula-Breaking Episode:
  • In Sink or Swim, Abby and Jonah decide to Screw Destiny and change the story of The Little Mermaid on purpose instead of on accident. They do this because they don't want the story to end with the Mermaid dying like in the original text.
  • In the three special editions Abby In Wonderland, Abby In Oz, and Abby In Neverland, Abby ventures into classic children's novels instead of fairy tales. She also doesn't use the Magic Mirror to travel to these stories.
    • In the first two special editions, Abby travels with her friends Robin, Frankie, and Penny instead of her brother Jonah.
    • In Abby In Neverland, she travels with Jonah's friends Ben and Isaac, along with Jonah himself.
• Fractured Fairy Tale: All the fairy tales in the series happen to be this, the ‘correct versions’ we all came to know and love just being retellings with false or left out details. They become even more fractured once Abby and Jonah rewrite them.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The rich and arrogant Penny is this for Abby's posse of friends until she Took a Level in Kindness in Abby in Wonderland.
• Fun with Acronyms: Abby's friend group is called FRA, which stands for Frankie, Robin, and Abby. By the end of Abby In Wonderland, the friend group is now called FRAP, with the addition of Fourth Ranger Penny.
  • In Cold As Ice, a group named JARG was formed, consisting of Jonah, Abby, Ralph, and Gerda.^note Ralph is a talking reindeer and Gerda is the protagonist of The Snow Queen, the fairy tale where Cold As Ice takes place in.
    • Later in the same book, this acronym gets updated into JARGSKNP, with the last four initials standing for Sharon, Kai, Nicolette, and Prince. ^note Sharon is a robber from the robber band, Kai is Gerda's friend who was captured by the Snow Queen, and Nicolette is the Snow Queen.
• Furniture Blockade: Abby and Jonah use this tactic in Fairest of All, blocking Snow's front door with furniture to stop Evil Evelyn from breaking in.
• Green-Eyed Monster: Abby calls herself this by name after destroying Penny’s painting out of envy in Beauty Queen.
• Guilt-Induced Nightmare: Abby had a Nightmare Sequence the night after she destroyed Penny's painting. In her nightmare, she was attacked by giant talking roses, the same ones Abby destroyed in the painting.
• Hilarity Ensues: Abby and Jonah try to help the characters get their traditional Happily Ever After. Spoiler warning, but this doesn’t work out for them.
• Howl of Sorrow: Abby does one after getting turned into a beast.
• I Am a Monster: Abby feels like one for destroying Penny’s painting in Beauty Queen. It’s made even worse when she gets turned into a beast.
• Inappropriate Hunger: Jonah pulls one in Fairest of All. The siblings have just been sucked up through the magic mirror and are in a forest in their pajamas, alone, defenseless and searching for possible shelter, when Jonah suddenly asks Abby if she has any Cheetos.
• Inevitable Waterfall: Abby and Jonah encounter a waterfall that they fall off of in Once Upon a Frog while aboard the canoe they found out of nowhere.
• Karmic Nod: Abby felt she deserved her Guilt-Induced Nightmare and her Forced Transformation into a beast as punishment for ruining Penny's painting.
• Kid Hero: Being ten and seven respectively, Abby and Jonah are essentially this. After all, they’ve been through hell and back just to get fairy tale stories right, including saving kingdoms and living, breathing human beings from the clutches of evil, so why wouldn’t they be?
• Ladyella: When Abby turns into a beast, Jonah asks if she'll go by a new name, but says she'll need something more girly than "beast" and suggests "Beastella."
• Lame Rhyme Dodge: At the beginning of Abby In Wonderland, Penny plans to host a lip-syncing contest with her friends, and Abby worries that she won't know the lyrics to Penny's songs. Frankie suggests to fake lip-sync by mouthing the word "watermelon" repeatedly. Abby then uses it to defend herself in this exchange:
  Abby:(grumbles something not very nice about Penny)
  Penny: What did you say?
  Abby: Watermelon.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: After Maryrose accidentally wipes Jonah’s memory, he remembers everything about his life but one thing: the fact that they’ve gone to fairy tales.
• Loyal Animal Companion: The siblings adopt a dog named Prince in Dream On. He accompanies them on their fairy tale adventures ever since.
• Madness Mantra: In Fairest Of All, Abby finds a sheet of paper in Evil Evelyn's bedroom drawer with the phrase "the fairest of all" repeatedly written on it.
• Magic Mirror: Without the magic mirror in Abby and Jonah’s basement, the entire series wouldn’t have happened. As this is also a fairy tale-themed series, magic mirrors appear frequently.
  • Gabrielle and Maryrose are also talking magic mirrors. Or, at least, people trapped in magic mirrors.
• Meaningful Echo: In If The Shoe Fits, Abby describes Kayla in a certain pattern, comparing her against several traits she doesn't have. Twelve chapters later, Abby encounters her again and reuses almost the exact same description word-by-word. This description echo is Played for Drama on the second time around, when Abby stumbles upon her in town and fears that she will try to ruin Cinderella's crownie business.

(first time) Her hair isn't straight and it's not curly. It's more zig-zaggy. A little frizzy. And it's not blond. Or brunette. It's in the middle. And her eyes aren't blue or green or sparkly. They're small. And her lips are kind of thin.

(twelve chapters later) Her hair isn't blond or brunette. It's in the middle. And frizzy. Her eyes aren't blue or green or sparkly or really big. They're average. And her lips are kind of thin.

• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Abby and Jonah don't mean to keep messing up the fairy tales. It just sort of keeps happening.
• Mirror Character: In Abby in Oz, Robin, Frankie, and Penny's personalities align with the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion, respectively. Robin worries that she's not smart enough, Frankie began acting passive-aggressive for reasons she doesn't want to share, and Penny could use some extra courage. This way, they mirror the Scarecrow's wish for brains, the Tin Man's wish for a heart, and the Lion's wish for courage. In addition, Robin, Penny, and Frankie are shown wearing outfits resembling their mirrored characters on the cover.
• Mind-Control Eyes: In As Cold As Ice, anyone under the Snow Queen's spell has white pupils instead of black ones.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: A short moment of this in Once Upon A Frog. Abby is with Robin, Frankie, and Penny, addressing them in her narration as her three friends, then immediately correcting it to "two friends plus Penny".
• Named by the Adaptation: Each book gives names to fairy tale characters who weren't named in their original stories.
• New Friend Envy: Abby faces competition against Penny over attention from Robin. The last straw is when Abby, Frankie, and Robin were going to spend time together after school, but Robin wanted to go to Penny's instead. Abby forces Robin to choose between either her and Frankie or Penny. Robin chooses the latter.
• Not Allowed to Grow Up: Abby and Jonah remain ten and seven throughout the whole series.
  • The audiobook of Abby In Neverland includes a conversation between the series author Sarah Mlynowski and the audiobook narrator Emily Eiden, where they address this dilemma.
    Emily Eiden: When will Abby finally turn eleven?
    Sarah Mlynowski: (laughs) Never! Abby will never turn eleven!
    Both: (laughing hysterically)
  • Only about half a year has elapsed throughout the entire series, the seasons changing from autumn, winter, and finally spring. In her conversation with Emily Eiden, Sarah has explained this as her way to skirt around this trope. She makes sure that the in-universe time elapses as slowly as possible so that Abby can remain at the same age all the while. This means that Sarah must avoid mentioning changing seasons, which would imply time has passed.
• Old Beggar Test: In Two Peas In A Pod, Abby holds a contest to decide the new princess to rule the kingdom of Bog. She gives each contestant a gold coin before disguising as an old beggar woman and asking for them to donate. Only the generous contestants would give away their coins and pass the test.
• Off the Rails: What inevitably happens to the fairy tales once Abby and Jonah get inserted into them.
• One-Steve Limit: In Bad Hair Day, whenever anyone mentions the prince in the story, Prince the dog believes they're talking about him. To stop the confusion, Abby and Jonah refer to the prince as "Pickles" instead.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: In Fairest Of All when Abby, Jonah and Snow are sneaking into Evil Evelyn's castle, Snow disguises herself by wearing a pointy pink hat, Abby's lime-green pajamas, and covering her iconic red lips with flour. The group claims that they are the decorators Evil Evelyn assigned to redesign parts of the palace.
  Snow: (to a guard) We've never met. Never, ever. I am not a princess. I'm a decorator.
• Pet Gets the Keys: Prince tried to pull off this trope in Sugar and Spice by stealing the keys to Abby and Jonah's cages while the evil witch holding them captive was asleep. He gets stopped when the witch woke up.
• Pop-Cultural Osmosis: Jonah often only knows the various fairy tales from their Disney Animated Canon versions.
• Portal Slam: Abby has to deal with the Magic Mirror not working in If the Shoe Fits. After the events of the first book, Abby and Jonah had tried to enter the portal again for the past three nights, but the mirror wouldn't let them in. The mirror finally let them into Cinderella's world when Abby entered wearing pajamas that matched the colors of the kingdom's flag.
  • Furthermore, Maryrose doesn't always let Abby and Jonah in because she wants them to bring specific items that will make them better prepared for certain fairy tales. However, she doesn't explicitly tell them what she wants them to bring, so they have to guess every night. As a result, Maryrose might not let them in for days of failed attempts, which gets quite frustrating on Abby's behalf.
• Promoted to Parent: This idea is sometimes discussed whenever Abby acts overprotective over Jonah. Notably, in Abby In Neverland, Abby has to deal with not only Jonah but also his friends Ben and Isaac. The three boys combined are incompetent and refuse to listen to Abby. Abby compares her situation with a past incident with her mom earlier that night, realizing how stressful being a parent figure is.
• Public Domain Character: Most of the characters Abby and Jonah meet inside the fairy tales are this.
• Really 700 Years Old: Maryrose has been trapped in the mirror for centuries, but she still looks like a young woman around Abby's mom's age.
• Real Men Cook: Mr. Beast likes cooking. One of the reasons he wants to change back into a beast after becoming human again is because he can cook better and more often. As a beast, he has a stronger sense of smell and can eat much more often than as a human.
• Rich Bitch: Penny is wealthy and Abby has a grudge against her.
• Rule of Three: The Magic Mirror in the basement must be knocked three times to activate.
• Running Gag: Jonah's favorite fairy tale is Jack and the Beanstalk, and he really wants to visit it via the mirror. Every time Jonah enters a fairy tale, Jonah automatically assumes that they are finally in Jack's story, despite all the obvious reasons why that they aren't. He finally gets his wish in Spill the Beans.
• Sibling Yin-Yang: A point Abby strongly makes in Fairest of All.
  It's amazing we're even related, really; we're so different. I like reading. He likes adventures. I like cuddling up in my bed with a book. He'd rather be rock climbing. Seriously. Mom takes him to rock-climbing classes at the Y on Sundays.
• Sixth Ranger: "Fourth Ranger" in this case. After the events of Abby In Wonderland, Penny joins Abby's friend group established earlier in the series. The friend group is renamed from FRA to FRAP to accommodate its newest member.
• Sleep Walking: In Dream On, Robin is shown to have a ridiculous amount of skill in sleepwalking. She sleepwalked from Abby's room down two flights of stairs to the basement, where she slammed herself on the Magic Mirror until it sucked her inside. Later, while under the magical sleeping spell, Robin sleepwalked from the top of the West Tower all the way to Princess Bri's bedroom in the castle. To do so, she had to descend slippery stairs with no railing.
  Bri: She's even under the covers! She can do that in her sleep?
• Spanner in the Works: Abby and Jonah to pretty much every fairy tale they wind up in.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Several fairy tale characters end up surviving the events of their stories thanks to Abby and Jonah's interference.
• Strictly Formula: Each book has Abby and Jonah get transported by their Magic Mirror into the world of a fairy tale and then inadvertently mess that tale up and cause it to go Off the Rails. They then have to fix the mess they've made and bring the story to its own version of happily-ever-after.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Jonah is obsessed with ketchup.
• True Love's Kiss: Played with and subverted.
  • In Fairest of All, Abby and Jonah follow the original story of Snow White and try to get Prince Trevor to kiss Snow and wake her up from her slumber. They try to have the evil queen poison Snow the first few times, but to no avail. Instead, they let Snow pretend she's poisoned by lying in a coffin. However, Snow hid behind a tree out of shyness when Trevor arrived, completely blowing the entire plan.
  • During the climax, Evil Evelyn kills Prince Trevor with an arrow to his heart. Unlike the original story, where the prince performs the True Love’s Kiss onto Snow White, Snow performs it onto the prince and he wakes up. It’s revealed that Snow didn’t actually kiss Prince Trevor, but instead performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
• Wham Episode: Good As Gold, where Maryrose finally escapes from the mirror Abby and Jonah have tried to free her from for the entire series.
• Why Waste a Wedding?: In Sink Or Swim, Lana turns down her wedding with Prince Mortimer at the last moment. The wedding attendees are angry that they traveled to see the wedding only for it to be cancelled, so Prince Mortimer finds another princess to marry instead.
• Year Inside, Hour Outside: Most fairy tale has a different time zone than the real world. For example, in Snow White’s world, a day spent there is equivalent to one hour elapsed in Smithville.
  • A few fairy tales avert this trope, having time move at the same speed as in Smithville.
  • Sugar and Spice has a Year Outside, Hour Inside time zone instead; time in this fairy tale elapses twice as fast compared to Smithville. This means Abby and Jonah have much less time than usual and must Race Against the Clock. This tight time limit sets the stage for a more fast-paced narrative compared to other books in the series.
• You Are Number 6: In Just Dance, the king names his twelve daughters this way based on the order they were born.
  • The princesses want to subvert this trope by giving themselves unique nicknames. Downplayed subversion because the nicknames still sound very similar to their assigned numbers.