- Harry Driscoll is living in New York City
(if you call trying to survive on an editorial assistant's salary living).His family is wealthy(but Harry Driscoll is not).His education is Ivy League(but what good is it doing him?).His publishing job is entry-level(with no exit in sight).BUTHarry Driscoll has a dream(if you call an unfinished manuscript hidden in the closet a dream).Harry Driscoll has a girl(although intercourse is out of the question).Harry Driscoll even has feelings.(He asked this girl, one day in the park, to be in his life forever . . . and he meant it!)
The Frog King is a love story by Adam Davies (in that it involves love). It's also a motion picture
- or planned to be, at any rate.
Not to be confused with the classic Fairy Tale, "The Frog Prince"
A lot of entries are Zero-Context Example entries, and have been commented out.
This book provides examples of:
- Author Vocabulary Calendar: Harry reads the dictionary and has logomachy games with Jordie.
- Can't Have Sex, Ever: Evie starts the novel off with endometriosis, which makes sex excruciatingly painful.
- Infallible Narrator: To be fair, Harry's an aspiring writer. Still, 'Her black hair was curling madly in the heat in a gonzo Pre-Raphaelite way I already knew she hated and she smelled of the street - dirty rainwater and hot tar'?
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He may be an alcoholic, a failure at his job, a complete asshole to his girlfriend, a compulsive liar, and absolutely self-absorbed - but at least Harry looks after Birdie. Sort of. A little.
- Princess for a Day: Harry and Evie have a game called 'Madame Bovary' where they pretend to be famous and try on expensive clothes.
- Painting the Medium: The text is littered with 'Question' and 'Answer' segments by the narrator/Harry, as well as a 'Correction'.
- Sophisticated as Hell: Jordie Wesselesh is a lexicographer, which means he uses words from all cultures - like 'Cronkite' for news.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Harry hates clichés and the 'Hallmark' idea of love, and tries to avoid being too romantically cliché. Evie eventually points out that he's completely missed the fact that his attitude to life is, by that point, one big
Wangst.
