Once Upon A Toad  by Heather Vogel Frederick is about two stepsisters named Cat & Olivia and they both really hate each other. The book takes place in Portland, Oregon. The two girls are so different from each other. Cat lives with her mom in Houston, Texas and came to Oregon for three months because her mom is on a mission in space and Cat loves classical music and is a tomboy. Olivia, on the other hand loves arts and crafts and is a total girly girl.

       At school Olivia and all her friends make fun of Cat and call her mean names like Catbox and hold their noses whenever they walk by Cat. Cat thinks everything is as bad as it gets so she calls Great-Aunt Abyssinia (A.K.A. Aby) to come. She tells Aby everything and Aby tells Cat that she will find a really good way to fix this. The next morning Cat wakes up and things had just gone from bad to way worse. Everytime words came out of her mouth toads came out too. But whenever Olivia talked, diamonds and flowers came out of her mouth. Soon everyone all over knew about the diamonds, flowers and toads. After that everyone wanted Olivia so some people kidnapped their little brother Geoffrey to get Olivia. Olivia and Cat have to run away to find him and to stop all this crazy fairytale stuff from happening. One of my favorite quotes from the book that Cat said is, “I drew a shaky breath. It still made absolutely no sense. Middle-schoolers didn’t start spontaneously spewing toads. How could this be happening? How could that creature have come from me? My mouth still tasted like breakfast cereal, not toad. Not that I knew what toad tasted like.”

      I really, really liked Once Upon A Toad. I would recommend this book to people who like realistic fiction with a hint of fantasy because it’s about people not monsters and it’s in a realistic place not somewhere made up but the fantasy part is you can not just start spitting out toads and flowers and diamonds and there is no such thing as casting spells. I would rate this book four stars ****! The book is written in a fun way. I really like Once Upon A Toad and I think you should read it too.