Author Interview: Angelica and the Bear Prince by Trung Le Nguyen

With Angelica and the Bear Prince, Trung Le Nguyen turns from the sweeping themes of The Magic Fish to a story that feels more intimate yet just as powerful, balancing teen grief, burnout, friendship, and first crushes in a way that fills every page with heart. Inspired by fairy tale retellings, classic romances, and even the whimsy of a theater mascot’s DMs, Trung explores how the quietest moments of adolescence can still hold the biggest emotions. In our conversation, he reflects on drawing out those softer, enormous feelings, the unusual spark behind Angelica’s journey, and how retelling stories across time continues to shape his creative work. Check out our interview below and pick up Angelica and the Bear Prince, out this week!

Angelica and the Bear Prince

by Trung Le Nguyen
Published by: Random House Graphic
on October 7, 2025
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At her lowest point, a teen girl finds solace and a potential crush in her local theater's mascot's DMs, sparking a quest to uncover the true identity of this mysterious figure. From the bestselling author of The Magic Fish comes a new fairy tale romance with a twist.
What do you do when you're the girl who can do it all, and suddenly you can't?
After burning out last year, Angelica is ready to get her life back together. Thankfully she has amazing friends to support her...including Peri the Bear, the mascot of her town's local theater. At her lowest moments, Angelica found comfort in private messaging Peri's social media account, and well, she might have a bit of a crush. Now, Angelica is interning at the local theater in the hopes of finding the person beind the account and thanking them. Who was this mysterious stranger and why did they help her out? Was it just caring for a stranger...or did they feel the same connection that Angelica felt?

Interview with Trung Le Nguyen

Angelica’s story balances burnout, friendship, and first crushes in such a heartfelt way. What inspired you to explore the softer, quieter side of teen grief and navigating life in this book?

The reader response to my first book, The Magic Fish, really took me by surprise. Through that book I had a lot of wonderful conversations about really big ideas—queerness, immigration, language, diaspora. Those topics, even though they can be so personal, can feel far-reaching and enormous. I wanted my second project to be a little more intimately focused, so that was the seed of Angelica and the Bear Prince. This was, of course, a total miscalculation on my part because teen feelings are, frankly, also enormous. In trying to explore something softer and quieter, I wound up magnifying those big feelings. It’s like I tugged the edges of the story inward to make the narrative experience a little more snug, but all I really did was make those feelings fill up the entire story space. And I really enjoyed that.

The idea of finding comfort in a theater mascot’s DMs is so unusual yet charming. How did you land on that as the spark for Angelica’s journey?

It was partly because I try to remind myself that branded accounts are run by people. I’m always pushing back on any impulse to treat social media accounts like a Yelp page for an individual. The other part of it is that I find the Muppets so enchanting, especially the ways performers who share space with those puppets get pulled into the fantasy. It didn’t feel like a leap to use someone in a mascot suit as the romantic interest in a story like this. And mostly, that bear suit was fun to draw!

The Magic Fish has such a strong connection to storytelling and identity. Did writing this fairy tale romance change how you think about the kinds of stories you want to tell next?

I think the process of making this book really impressed on me that there are infinite ways to explore the lineage of a story. Angelica and the Bear Prince is ostensibly a silly retelling of East of the Sun and West of the Moon, but I think the story I leaned on the most for inspiration was Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner. The movie was itself a remake of a Hungarian play, Parfumerie by Miklós László. The Shop Around the Corner was then remade nine years later with Judy Garland and Van Johnson as In the Good Old Summertime, and then almost fifty years later we got another remake, You’ve Got Mail from Nora Ephron. I used to think of fairy tales as things that change their clothes and remake themselves wherever they find themselves in time or in the world, but every story does this. And I’m excited to keep exploring stories this way, finding old roots and cultivating them in new ways.