🐸💚 Frog Heart by Joy Deva Baglio
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5
When a mother’s infant daughter has a failing heart, she is drawn to a mysterious pond, where she meets a giant, talking frog that offers a solution to the problem. But is fighting nature’s course worth a strange and inhuman life?
I LOVED this short story. At the beginning you can feel the mother’s desperation to save her daughter, and later you feel her desperation to smother her daughter with the fear of what she is becoming. And then at the end, you feel her desperation to understand where it all went wrong, and how she can see what her children see.
Truly a modern fairy tale, I feel very attached to the King Frog and want to read this story multiple times. I want to revisit the bargain, the betrayal, and the yearning. Some part of me, as a trans person, really related to the daughter who suddenly understands what she is and what she can do, despite her mother trying to hide it all these years. Just, wow. I hope Joy Deva Baglio makes a full collection of fairy tales because I’d love to read more.
