Prince Auric DeVrie spent his whole life gathering treasure for the woman he loved. He died before he could give her a single piece of it.

Desperate for one more chance to say what he never got to say, he poured his own spirit into a book of magic spells — and got trapped inside it for a thousand years.

When he finally finds a way out, his plan is simple: recreate himself, recreate the princess, and finally confess his love. His execution is not simple. It's Penrose, an idiot made entirely of sawdust, who gets sent to carry it out — and Penrose has a real gift for turning "simple" into "catastrophic."

Chased by the wizard Shelburne the Magnificent, the vicious giant LaRoche, and the self-cursed Henri Dassault, Penrose stumbles into an unlikely ally: 17-year-old Gavin Baycroft, who has plenty of romantic disasters of his own already in progress.

Together, they drag Prince Auric from 10th-century France into 21st-century California — where he finally gets his chance to say the words he died still holding onto.

Fairy tales, it turns out, have a way of surprising everyone. Including the prince who thought he already knew how his ended.