
This Princess Kills Monsters
The Misadventures of a Fairy-Tale Stepsister: A Novel
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
Buy for $20.70
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Kristen Sieh
-
Ry Herman
-
By:
-
Ry Herman
About this listen
A princess with a mostly useless magical talent takes on horrible monsters, a dozen identical masked heroes, and a talking lion in a quest to save a kingdom—and herself—in this affectionate satire of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale The Twelve Huntsmen.
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.
©2025 Ry Herman (P)2025 Random House AudioCritic reviews
“Madcap, monster-packed, and swoon-worthy, This Princess Kills Monsters is a romp through deftly reimagined fairy-tale terrain. Melilot is a princess with humor and heart amid a cast of characters who are likewise uproarious and sparkling, yet grounded in real emotion. This delightful adventure is as enchanting as it is hilarious.”—Julia Seales, nationally bestselling author of A Most Agreeable Murder
“The Princess Bride meets Shrek in this delightfully feminist fairy tale full of thrilling quests, quirky characters, and lots of laughs. This Princess Kills Monsters turns familiar stories on their heads and invites readers on a magical adventure they’ll never want to end. Seeing the world of the Brothers Grimm through Princess Melilot’s eyes is the most fun I’ve ever had.”—Susie Dumond, author of Queerly Beloved
“This Princess Kills Monsters is exactly the sort of queer fairy tale for grown-ups that I have yearned to read. Ry Herman’s story is thrilling, irreverent, wondrous—yet unswervingly true to the hearts of those too wise to be honest and too wounded to believe.”—Ryka Aoki, author of Light from Uncommon Stars
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
A Far Better Thing
- By: H. G. Parry
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Priestley
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The faeries stole Sydney Carton as a child, and made him a mortal servant of the Faery Realm. Now, he has a rare opportunity for revenge against the fae and Charles Darnay, the changeling left in his stead.
By: H. G. Parry
-
If We Survive This
- By: Racquel Marie
- Narrated by: Racquel Marie
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Walking Dead meets Yellowjackets in If We Survive This, a tense and emotional young adult horror novel from award-winning author Racquel Marie about a teen girl leading a group of survivors on a perilous journey during the apocalypse.
By: Racquel Marie
-
The Beautiful Maddening
- By: Shea Ernshaw
- Narrated by: Kimberly Woods
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Seventeen year-old Lark Goode wants only one thing: to escape her small town of Cutwater and the history of her family name. It’s a history that began during the Dutch tulip mania of 1636, when Lark’s ancestor stole the last remaining tulip bulbs and fled to America. But when the tulips bloomed on American soil, madness sprouted from their snowy white petals. The madness was love. Now, generations later, the Goodes remain cursed—the unnatural flowers outside their home causing locals to fall helplessly in love with anyone carrying Goode blood in their veins.
By: Shea Ernshaw
-
The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery
- A Novel
- By: Clarence A. Haynes
- Narrated by: Brittany Bradford, André Santana
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To be a client of Gwendolyn Montgomery—New York’s most powerful publicist, at Sublime Creative—is to be infused with a certain oomph, a mysterious glamour. She seems to have created the ideal life with her handsome new boyfriend, the perfect match. But Gwendolyn has a legion of long-buried secrets that could unravel everything. After a grisly, bizarre incident at the Brooklyn Museum, Gwendolyn begins to realize that something nefarious is happening tied directly to her past, right as Fonsi Harewood comes back into her world.
-
-
I’m forever an immersive reader
- By Raena G. on 06-19-25
-
The Mercy Makers
- By: Tessa Gratton
- Narrated by: Emily Lawrence
- Length: 19 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A talented heretic must decide between the pursuit of forbidden magic, or the ecstasy of forbidden love, in the start of a sweeping, romantic epic fantasy trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.
By: Tessa Gratton
-
Happy Wife
- A Novel
- By: Meredith Lavender, Kendall Shores
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nora Davies doesn’t exactly fit in to Winter Park, Florida, where old-guard Floridians mix with the tax-fleeing coastal elite. Twenty-eight and barely making ends meet working at a country club, Nora feels like she’s going nowhere fast. Enter Will Somerset: a prominent forty-six-year-old lawyer, father to a teenage daughter, and recently divorced. The two set Winter Park’s social scene agog when they fall in love and marry after a whirlwind Cinderella-style courtship. But Winter Park is fully upended when Will disappears the morning after a birthday bash Nora throws for him.
By: Meredith Lavender, and others
-
A Far Better Thing
- By: H. G. Parry
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Priestley
- Length: 13 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The faeries stole Sydney Carton as a child, and made him a mortal servant of the Faery Realm. Now, he has a rare opportunity for revenge against the fae and Charles Darnay, the changeling left in his stead.
By: H. G. Parry
-
If We Survive This
- By: Racquel Marie
- Narrated by: Racquel Marie
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Walking Dead meets Yellowjackets in If We Survive This, a tense and emotional young adult horror novel from award-winning author Racquel Marie about a teen girl leading a group of survivors on a perilous journey during the apocalypse.
By: Racquel Marie
-
The Beautiful Maddening
- By: Shea Ernshaw
- Narrated by: Kimberly Woods
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Seventeen year-old Lark Goode wants only one thing: to escape her small town of Cutwater and the history of her family name. It’s a history that began during the Dutch tulip mania of 1636, when Lark’s ancestor stole the last remaining tulip bulbs and fled to America. But when the tulips bloomed on American soil, madness sprouted from their snowy white petals. The madness was love. Now, generations later, the Goodes remain cursed—the unnatural flowers outside their home causing locals to fall helplessly in love with anyone carrying Goode blood in their veins.
By: Shea Ernshaw
-
The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery
- A Novel
- By: Clarence A. Haynes
- Narrated by: Brittany Bradford, André Santana
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To be a client of Gwendolyn Montgomery—New York’s most powerful publicist, at Sublime Creative—is to be infused with a certain oomph, a mysterious glamour. She seems to have created the ideal life with her handsome new boyfriend, the perfect match. But Gwendolyn has a legion of long-buried secrets that could unravel everything. After a grisly, bizarre incident at the Brooklyn Museum, Gwendolyn begins to realize that something nefarious is happening tied directly to her past, right as Fonsi Harewood comes back into her world.
-
-
I’m forever an immersive reader
- By Raena G. on 06-19-25
-
The Mercy Makers
- By: Tessa Gratton
- Narrated by: Emily Lawrence
- Length: 19 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A talented heretic must decide between the pursuit of forbidden magic, or the ecstasy of forbidden love, in the start of a sweeping, romantic epic fantasy trilogy by New York Times bestselling author Tessa Gratton.
By: Tessa Gratton
-
Happy Wife
- A Novel
- By: Meredith Lavender, Kendall Shores
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nora Davies doesn’t exactly fit in to Winter Park, Florida, where old-guard Floridians mix with the tax-fleeing coastal elite. Twenty-eight and barely making ends meet working at a country club, Nora feels like she’s going nowhere fast. Enter Will Somerset: a prominent forty-six-year-old lawyer, father to a teenage daughter, and recently divorced. The two set Winter Park’s social scene agog when they fall in love and marry after a whirlwind Cinderella-style courtship. But Winter Park is fully upended when Will disappears the morning after a birthday bash Nora throws for him.
By: Meredith Lavender, and others
-
Volatile Memory
- By: Seth Haddon
- Narrated by: Emily Gibbons Bouchard
- Length: 5 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With nothing but a limping ship and an outdated mask to her name, Wylla needs a big pay day. When the alert goes out that a lucrative piece of tech lies hidden on a nearby planet, she calls on all the swiftness of her prey-animal instincts to beat other hunters to it. What you found wasn’t your ticket out—it was my corpse wearing an AI mask. When you touched the mask, you heard my voice. A consciousness spinning through metal and circuits, a bodiless mind, spun to life in the HAWK’s temporary storage. I crystallized and realized: I was alive.
By: Seth Haddon
-
Hazel Says No
- A Novel
- By: Jessica Berger Gross
- Narrated by: Emma Galvin
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Hazel Blum’s father gets a tenured job at a prestigious college, she and her family relocate from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn to a middle-of-nowhere college town in Maine. With her mother, Claire, a clothing designer, and her father, Gus, an American Studies professor, Hazel and her eleven-year-old brother, Wolf, spend the summer at the town pool, where they acclimate to their new lives and connect with the town’s sprawling community.
-
UnWorld
- A Novel
- By: Jayson Greene
- Narrated by: Ilyana Kadushin, Cindy Kay, Imani Jade Powers, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and tormented by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex’s best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death. She keeps returning to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall, trying to sift through the shards. Aviva is an “upload,” a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether. But she’s “emancipated,” having left her human behind.
-
-
DNF
- By NMwritergal on 06-18-25
By: Jayson Greene
-
A Treachery of Swans
- By: A. B. Poranek
- Narrated by: Amalia Vitale
- Length: 11 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Two hundred years ago, a slighted deity stole the magic from Auréal and vanished without a trace. But seventeen-year-old Odile has a plan. All her life, her father, a vengeful sorcerer, has raised her for one singular task: infiltrate the royal palace and steal the king’s crown, an artefact with enough power to restore magic. But to enter the palace, she must assume the identity of a noblewoman. She chooses Marie d’Odette: famed for her beauty, a rumored candidate for future queen…and Odile’s childhood-friend-turned-sworn-enemy.
By: A. B. Poranek
-
To Gaze upon Wicked Gods
- By: Molly X. Chang
- Narrated by: Natalie Naudus, Molly X. Chang
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Heroes die, cowards live. Daughter of a conquered world, Ruying hates the invaders who descended from the heavens long before she was born and defeated the magic of her people with technologies unlike anything her world had ever seen. Blessed by Death, born with the ability to pull the life right out of mortal bodies, Ruying shouldn’t have to fear these foreign invaders, but she does. Especially because she wants to keep herself and her family safe. When Ruying’s Gift is discovered by an enemy prince, he offers her an impossible deal.
-
-
The portrayal of morally gray characters.
- By Anonymous User on 01-02-25
By: Molly X. Chang
-
This Vicious Hunger
- By: Francesca May
- Narrated by: Hannah Church
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the author of Wild and Wicked Things comes a dark gothic fantasy about two young women struggling to find the freedom of choice in a world where their path feels predetermined. Turning to each other, they soon find themselves sinking deeper into a world of beauty, poison, and the insatiable quest for knowledge.
By: Francesca May
-
The Everlasting
- By: Alix E. Harrow
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From the New York Times bestselling author of Starling House comes a moving and genre-defying quest following the reluctant knight whose legend built a nation and the desperate scholar sent back through time to ensure she meets her tragic fate—even if it breaks his heart.
By: Alix E. Harrow
-
The Late-Night Witches
- By: Auralee Wallace
- Narrated by: Robyn Maryke
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Cassie Beckett’s life is anything but magical. With a wild younger sister, three unruly kids, and an absent husband, she’s really not looking forward to the witching month of October. At least the gorgeous, foggy Prince Edward Island is always quiet. That is, until the vampires arrive. As the creatures sink their teeth into Cassie’s tenuous grip on normalcy, she’s forced to come face-to-face with long–disregarded family secrets. The legacy gifts her with power, but also a lofty responsibility: rid the island of vampires, or let them win. (Both options suck, in more ways than one.)
By: Auralee Wallace
-
Snake-Eater
- By: T. Kingfisher
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
With only a few dollars to her name and her beloved dog Copper by her side, Selena flees her past in the city to claim her late aunt’s house in the desert town of Quartz Creek. The scorpions and spiders are better than what she left behind. Because in Quartz Creek, there’s a strange beauty to everything, from the landscape to new friends, and more blue sky than Selena’s ever seen. But something lurks beneath the surface. Like the desert gods and spirits lingering outside Selena’s house at night, keeping watch.
By: T. Kingfisher
-
Notes on Infinity
- A Novel
- By: Austin Taylor
- Narrated by: Helen Laser, Shahjehan Khan
- Length: 10 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A singular, extraordinary debut about Zoe and Jack, Harvard students who find themselves propelled into the intoxicating biotech startup world when they announce they’ve discovered the cure for aging. A different kind of love story where the thirst for achievement consumes and the stakes are forever.
By: Austin Taylor
-
The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
- By: Malka Older
- Narrated by: Lindsey Dorcus
- Length: 4 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Mossa has returned to Valdegeld on a missing persons case, for which she’ll once again need Pleiti’s insight. Seventeen students and staff members have disappeared from Valdegeld University—yet no one has noticed. The answers to this case may lie on the moon of Io—Mossa’s home—and the history of Jupiter’s original settlements during humanity’s exodus from Earth. But Pleiti’s faith in her life’s work as a scholar of the past has grown precarious, and this new case threatens to further destabilize her dreams for humanity’s future, as well as her own.
-
-
I love this series!
- By Jim Cira on 01-21-25
By: Malka Older
-
These Heathens
- A Novel
- By: Mia McKenzie
- Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
- Length: 7 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Where do you get an abortion in 1960 Georgia, especially if your small town’s midwife goes to the same church as your parents? For seventeen-year-old Doris Steele, the answer is Atlanta, where her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lucas, calls upon her brash, wealthy childhood best friend, Sylvia, for help. While waiting to hear from the doctor who has agreed to do the procedure, Doris spends the weekend scandalized by, but drawn to, the people who move in and out of Sylvia’s orbit.
By: Mia McKenzie