#ry herman

[a-ramblinrose]

JOMP BPC || July 22 || Colors: This Princess Kills Monsters by Ry Herman

[sephrynmybeloved]

Princess Melilot from This Princess Kills Monsters ✨💙

[bookcoversonly]

Title: This Princess Kills Monsters | Author: Ry Herman | Publisher: Dial Press (2025)

[readingthroughthestarjar]

This Princess Kills Monsters by Ry Herman

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This one was a lot of fun! Very entertaining and I liked the romance, it was cute (also disaster bi mc!). I liked all of the fairytale references and it was just a little cozy and nice.

There were a few things that made me go "hm" but otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Next up is Carry On by Rainbow Rowell!

[wearethekat]

June Book Reviews: This Princess Kills Monsters by Ry Herman

One of my anticipated new releases for this year. In This Princess Kills Monsters, princess Melilot is tired of being sent on impossible tasks by her sorceress stepmother, especially since both of her sisters are much better at questing. Her stepmother unexpectedly offers her a final task--but it's to marry the heir of the neighboring kingdom, where something dark is brewing in the woods...

This book is based on Grimm's The Twelve Huntsmen, which is an impressively deep cut. As the original fairy tale is brief, there are many loose ends an adaptation can address: why is the king's advisor a gender-essentialist lion? How does assembling eleven body doubles and crossdressing convince your ex that the wedding should be back on?

When I started this book, I was a bit apprehensive that the author would take a flippant and jokey approach, which I find shallow. But this book is consistently elevated by obscure fairy tale references, from the Bremen Town Musicians to references to the type of story where the hero makes friends with guy with a giant nose whose skill at sniffing becomes critically plot-relevant. (Although Melilot's backstory is based on the much more conventional Rapunzel). In addition, Melilot's complex relationship with her mother and sisters is addressed sensitively, and there's a superfluous but sweet romance.

A solid comedy fairy tale retelling elevated by some truly deep cuts into the repertoire of the Brothers Grimm.

[readingtillmidnight]

This Princess Kills Monsters by Ry Herman

Release date: 17 June 2025

Genre: new adult fantasy romance

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

If you like:

Fairytale retellings/satire (especially The Twelve Huntsmen + Rapunzel)

Love triangles

Only one bedroll

Someone wants to murder Princess Melilot. This is sadly normal.

Melilot is sick of being ordered to go on dangerous quests by her domineering stepmother. Especially since she always winds up needing to be rescued by her more magically talented stepsisters. And now, she's been commanded to marry a king she’s never met.

When hideous spider-wolves attack her on the journey to meet her husband-to-be, she is once again rescued—but this time, by twelve eerily similar-looking masked huntsmen. Soon, she has to contend with near-constant attempts on her life, a talking lion that sets bewildering gender tests, and a king who can't recognize his true love when she puts on a pair of trousers. And all the while, she has to fight her growing attraction to not only one of the huntsmen, but also her fiancé’s extremely attractive sister.

If Melilot can't unravel the mysteries and rescue herself from peril, kingdoms will fall. Worse, she could end up married to someone she doesn’t love.

Content warnings

Death, violence, injury, blood

Death of parents

Hospitalisation

Confinement

Abusive parents, past child abuse

Medical malpractice / misinformation

Gender essentialism (in a comedic way from an antagonistic character no one takes seriously)

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC!

It's been a minute since I've read a book that was this much fun!

I loved Melilot as a protagonist, her humorous narration and references to various famous fairytales she has been involved in made this book a highly entertaining experience.

I loved the wacky fantastical worldbuilding, with the wide array of settings and magical creatures. Most of this book takes place in the kingdom Melilot travels to, but we still get to experience other places and stories from the stories told by the characters.

Stepmothers and stepsisters get villainised a lot in fairytales, so I was glad to see how this book approaches Melilot's relationships with them with nuance. In Cinderella, it's Cinderella against her two stepsisters who are fully related to each other, but here, Melilot and her stepsisters are all stepsisters to each other. In spite of that, they have a good relationship to each other, although Melilot struggles with feeling inferior to them.

The relationship between Melilot and her stepmother is where it gets interesting. Her stepmother is a classic Evil Queen™️, except that she's... sort of good? Her stepmother is a good and fair ruler, who ensures the safety and prosperity of the kingdom, and is an alright mother to her other two daughters. However, she is not a very good mother to Melilot. She makes decisions that she thinks are best for Melilot, but goes about it in a way that at times can be abusive. I was worried about how this would get resolved, but I think their relationship was treated with the nuance it deserves.

I'm not the biggest fan of love triangles, because I find that it's always pretty obviously which person the main character is going to choose, and that is definitely the case here. Regardless, I LOVED the romance! No spoilers, but it's easy to see why Melilot ends up with the person she ends up with. They have an easy chemistry from the moment they meet, and the way their relationship developed felt natural.

One thing that bugged me big time was how the antagonist was depicted. This book subverts and satirises fairytales and handles all these different relationships with nuance, yet somehow the villain was really one dimensional. I feel like the villain should have been more fleshed out, rather than just being like "I'm evil and power hungry rahhhh".

Overall, a really fun and enjoyable read!

[ilikereadingactually]

This Princess Kills Monsters

This Princess Kills Monsters: The Misadventures of a Fairy-Tale Stepsister by Ry Herman

listen. there are SO MANY fairy tale retellings out there, and i LOVE fairy tales, but even i have gotten tired of the same kinds of stories over and over again. but this one sounded fun, and the cover is so pretty and appealing that i decided to give it a go. I WAS SO PLEASANTLY SURPRISED! this book has real Into the Woods energy, in the sense that it's a mishmash of different stories all touching each other and taking place in a world where the conventions of fairy tales are just a part of life. also, it's FUNNY. it's so unusual to find a fairy tale retelling that offers genuine emotional storytelling as well as dry humor, a retelling that can kind of laugh at itself and the ridiculousness of Grimm-style stories.

a huge reason this book delights me so much is the narrative voice. we get a first person narrator, Melilot, which imo is hard to do skillfully enough to walk the line between immersive and annoying. Melilot is funny, clever, grounded in her background, and just unreliable enough to understand where her misapprehensions are coming from, when she has them. her limited POV is essential as she's figuring out what's going on in the foreign country where her sorceress queen mother has sent her to marry the king, and what the deal is with the king's twelve identical huntsmen, and talking gender-essentialist lion, and hot migraine-suffering sister. i adored Melilot; i was charmed by her sisters (one step-, one half-) and their weird spouses; i got a big kick out of all the huntsmen, especially charming Sam and moody Jack. i really loved trying to figure things out along with Melilot, with the added benefit of a sort of frame version of the tale offered at the beginning—and even with that help, i didn't figure out where the kingdom-threatening monsters were coming from until right before it was revealed.

overall this was such a fun romp of a read, absolutely delightful and, for me, the best kind of fairy tale story!

the deets

how i read it: an egalley from NetGalley and, because it's already out, an ebook on Libby. it will be a bittersweet day when i catch up enough to read things before they come out as NetGalley intends, but i have to read them in the kind of terrible NG mobile and/or desktop interfaces.

try this if you: were a fairy tale lover as a kid, dig a story where the queerness and transness is just casually baked in, long for a narrator who is snarky (ugh i hate that word) without being irritating, or just enjoy messy family dynamics mixed with messy adventure and romantic storylines in magical settings.

a line i really liked: there were a lot of bits where the prose delighted me but this one kind of encapsulates the vibe

I don't hate nature. I like the outdoors. Some of it. In limited doses. After journeying east of the sun and west of the moon on my stepmother's orders, I have seen vistas that defy the imagination with their grandeur. I have stood on a high, windswept cliff top so close to the stars that I could see them performing the joyous pirouettes and cartwheels that make them twinkle. I have descended into a cave so deep I could hear the buried gemstones singing their slow, thrumming songs. I have trudged across cotton-candy clouds to giants' castles, swum up waterfalls, and trekked over the glaring white plain of trackless ice that stretches across the rooftop of the world. But however beautiful a place might be, that does not necessarily mean you'd want to spend the night there.

pub date: June 17, 2025, a paperback first printing! go pick it up!

[fitzchivraly]

currently reading this princess kills monsters by ry herman and i'm wondering if my lack of knowledge on western fairytales is hindering my enjoyment of this book. i was able to pick up references to SOME fairytales but i didn't get the others until some people in my book club (we're doing a buddy reading of this) points it out! i think i'll have to read more fairytales after this book because it's pretty interesting how the fairytales are incorporated into the plot. but i'm always endlessly fascinated by how different cultures have their interpretations of the same stories! so i will keep reading to see what else i can pick up