Book Jacket:
Azalea is trapped. Just when she should feel that everything is before her . . . beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing . . . it’s taken away. All of it.
The Keeper understands. He’s trapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. And so he extends an invitation.
Every night, Azalea and her eleven sisters may step through the enchanted passage in their room to dance in his silver forest.
But there is a cost.
The Keeper likes to keep things.
Azalea may not realize how tangled she is in his web until it is too late.
You can read an excerpt here.
Review:
My response to this book can be summed up thusly: awwwww (silly smile).
If you’re in the mood for a light, sweet, confection of a read, Entwined is exactly that. This book is a fairly straightforward, traditional retelling, and as such it doesn’t bring anything startlingly new or original to the mix, but it just has a lovely way in how it goes about telling its story, bringing a fresh sense of discovery to a somewhat neglected fairy tale. With fun characters and plenty of magic, Entwined is a lovely read.
There is something of a turn of the century flavor to Entwined, quietly painted around the edges of this story – you’ll see it in the King’s rather enlightened way of finding suitors for his daughters, in the brief mention of a coming railroad, and most of all in the princesses themselves. They are a feisty, independent lot, brimming with personality. One of my favorite parts of this book was watching Azalea deal with her precocious siblings, with varying degrees of loving exasperation.
The story opens with the queen’s death, and Azalea, as the eldest, has to shoulder the burdens of a mother’s role at a very young age – and with her independent-minded siblings, she has her hands full. Dixon touches on their sorrow, on Azalea’s sense of being lost and overwhelmed, but though the story is affecting, things stay fairly light – this is a fairy tale, after all. I loved how the queen’s death fractured Azalea’s relationship with her father, leading to various painful confrontations – Dixon’s interpretation of the king as a military leader, a man of order who has no idea what to do with this passel of girls, is absolutely wonderful. As the king turns cold and distant in his grief, the girls reject him in turn, and the growing gulf between provides the perfect opportunity for the dark enchantment to slither its way in.
The magic in this story stays fairly general – a magical history to the castle, magical objects – and as such it stays firmly on the Disney side of fairy tale fun. The enchanted world below the castle, where the daughters go to dance, is very faithfully depicted – and I found myself more than once thinking of Robin McKinley’s Twelve Dancing Princesses short story, as both rely on the traditional tale and thus have similar imagery – but Dixon brings a second kind of magic to her story, through the princesses’ love of dancing. Dixon is an author who clearly knows her dance steps, and her descriptions of the many traditional dances in this story are wonderfully clear and detailed. If you enjoy the type of dance scenes you see in Jane Austen movies, you will definitely enjoy the dancing in this story – it makes for lovely scenes.
I’ll admit I did feel that things started to slow down in the second act, when the nightly rendition of the enchanted ball became a bit repetitive, but the daughters’ evolving relationship with their father, and of course the arrival of various potential suitors, kept my interest. Not to mention there are three – yes, three! – romantic subplots to this story, each unique and adorable in its own way, and altogether they imbue this tale with a charm that is impossible to resist.
The finale comes to a head nicely, with plenty of rousing action, magic, and romance, and Entwined stays true to its fairy tale origins to the very happy end.
And so Entwined may be a familiar type of story – at various times it reminded me of Disney’s Tangled, Robin McKinley’s The Twelve Dancing Princesses, and Shannon Hale – but it definitely is an enjoyable one. If you’re a fan of sweet, simple, and romantic fairy tales, just sit back, relax, and enjoy.
Byrt Grade: A-
As Levar Burton used to say – you don’t have to take my word for it…
Publishers Weekly (starred review) says:
Readers who enjoy stories of royalty, romance, and magic will delight in Dixon’s first novel. Part confection, part acute observation, the story of Azalea and her sisters is a reimagining of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” by an author who knows both the protocols and the pleasures of dance.
This book reads like a fairy tale. It was enchanting, interesting, and had both edge-of-your-seat moments and swoon-worthy moments. You float along with the story. My only complaint was that you don’t float very fast.
Maybe my love of the original tale made me biased as I was reading, maybe it made me more critical, but overall I loved Entwined. Were there things that I wasn’t fond of? Yes, (all the flower names for the sisters, for example) but the great parts outweighed them in my opinion.
This review was better than most I have come by. I particularly enjoy this book. It is one of my personal favorites and i have read it over and over again. You can easily relate most of the characters to at least one person in your life. Azalea reminds me of my best friend, Bramble, my other friend, and Eve, me. A great retelling of The Twelve Dancing princesses, but for an older audience of at least eight years old. it is an easy and fast read, but it sucks you in and, once you start reading, you can only stop for food. When i first got it, I stayed up all night reading it! There is just enough magic in it to balance out with the non-magic and the characters are never boring. A magical and gorgeous book.