Entwined - Heather Dixon (4.5 Stars)

Come and mend your broken hearts here.

Just when Azalea should feel that everything is before her — beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing — it's taken away. All of it. And Azalea is trapped. The Keeper understands. He's trapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. 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.

So, Heather Dixon wrote this book called Entwined, which is an adaptation of the fairytale "The Twelve Dancing Princesses." So basically Ms. Dixon said, "Hey, would you like to dance?" And me, fool that I am, said, "Sure." And she dragged me out on the dance floor and sucked me into this brilliant, beautiful, fun, and uplifting novel that has no sequel! How am I supposed to live in a world where Entwined has no sequel? I don't care if everybody got their happily ever after, there should be more to this book! Evil, evil woman…I think she enjoys the pain of her fans.

For the record, I own four novels (have read five) and own/have read various short story adaptations (and the Barbie movie) of this fairytale. Entwined is absolutely the best (followed by The Midnight Dancers by Regina Doman and Barbie in the Twelve Dancing Princesses, which are tied for second place). The brilliance of Entwined is that it has the best reasons for pretty much everything:

— why the girls are dancing in this enchanted space to begin with
— why they refuse to tell anyone where they're going
— why the girls are dancing in secret instead of out in the open
— why the king offers the princess's hand in exchange for discovering the secret

The other thing I like: all the princesses have their own distinct personalities, which makes it a lot easier to tell them apart. This is the only version of this story where I've seen that, except in the Faerie Tale Theatre episode, but there were only six princesses and I could never tell the twins apart. In Entwined, we have from eldest to youngest (and yes, they're all named after plants; their family has a thing for gardens—they have an aunt named Mugwort):

— Azalea, crown princess, has a bit of a temper, but brave and loyal and loving
— Bramble, brave but also impulsive, bit of a tomboy, a little too proud, but really funny
— Clover, the prettiest but also the shyest of the twelve
— Delphinium, the girly-girl, the romantic, who can be a bit melodramatic
— Evening Primrose (called Eve), who loves to read
— Flora, one of the twins, very studious and not much of a rule-breaker
— Goldenrod, the other twin, a relative rule-breaker compared to Flora
— Hollyhock, who lisps and loves oranges and asks a bazillion questions
— Ivy, who loves food in general
— Jessamine, doesn't talk very much and is a bit shy
— Kale, who's not talking yet but screams a lot when upset
— Lily, the new baby princess

I'll admit, the beginning of the book is a little sad (and right here is my SPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILERSPOILER! warning).

Anyway, the book starts out a little funny but morphs quickly into some serious sadness. It's Christmas Eve, the queen is pregnant with her twelfth child, and she's very sick — so sick, in fact, that when she gives birth to the youngest princess, Lily, the queen dies. The book spans the required year of mourning that takes place after the queen's death. And because the royal family is in mourning, they have to follow the rules of mourning: no visitors or visiting except on royal business or to church; wearing all black; no celebrations or parties; no courting; and absolutely no dancing.

But the princesses want to dance. It's the thing that makes them feel closest to their mother, who loved dancing with all her heart, and it's something they can do together as a family. They all love to dance. But their father, King Harold, doesn't want them to because a) it's against the rules of mourning and he's very strict about rules, is the king, and b) it reminds him too much of the queen, whom he loved very much. In fact there's a scene where the third-eldest princess, Clover, is trying to explain to the king that dancing reminds them of the queen and makes them feel close to her and his expression is like someone just stabbed him because it hurts him just to hear people talk about her.

So here's the basic plot of the book is: princesses dance in magical pavilion which turns out to be a trap laid by an evil sorcerer in order to free himself and kill the king, and because of a magical oath the girls took called Swearing on Silver they literally cannot tell the king or anyone else what they're up to (very sneaky, Ms. Dixon, giving them a good reason like that), and they have to find a way around the oath in order to protect themselves, the king, and their kingdom. This all takes place against the backdrop of the twelve of them and the king mourning the death of the queen, and how they heal from that loss is a big thread of the story.

Now, the king is kind of a jerk in the first half of the book, and part of that's because he's in mourning and really misses his wife, but the other reason is because of something that as the reader kind of makes you gasp in sympathetic agony for the poor guy but that the girls don't really process (they just shove it into the mental box labeled "Dad's Being a Jerk, Don't Listen") — he thinks his daughters wish that he had died instead of the queen.

You don't find this out until a little more than midway through the story, when he and the girls are having an argument, and he shouts, "You shall have to come to the reckoning that it is I who you have, and not your mother, and so it is. Nothing can help that. Despise me for it, as I know you all do…" I read that and was just like, "Well, jeez…no wonder he's so stiff and distant all the time. He thinks they hate him. That's a horrible thing for a parent to feel."

But dancing is what the girls love, so their attitude is basically, "Screw off, Dad, we're doing it." I can admire that, having been in that position about things I liked when I was young. Only one problem — the strangely compelling and very handsome Mr. Keeper, trapped within the walls of the castle, offers them a place to dance. And they don't know anything about this guy.

Of course, this is set in like, Victorian times, sort of, and children weren’t taught to beware of serial killers, pedophiles, white slave traffickers, and other bad types back then. So the girls are relatively trusting, and they feel bad for Mr. Keeper, who's trapped in the castle in the same way the girls feel trapped. So they dance at his magical pavilion, and all he asks in return is that they find a way to break the curse holding him to the pavilion and preventing him from walking around in the real world.

I have to admire girls who stick to their guns, though. When their dad finds out they've been dancing even though he expressly forbids it ("Mourning is meant to show the grief inside us. Dancing [and other such things forbidden by mourning] dishonor your mother's memory…How can you all treat your mother's memory in such an appalling way?"), he takes their dancing slippers, so they dance in regular shoes, even though it really tears up their feet. As in, blood staining their stockings after a couple days.

What I like about that is that the king gives in when he sees how much it matters to them. At first he's ticked that they'd hurt themselves just to disobey him, but then Clover explains it to him — which is brave of her because she's painfully shy — and at first he's like, "Well, it won't help," but when it becomes clear he's really hurt them with his attitude, he not only gives in, he has new slippers made for them, and he's willing to replace them when they wear out, as long as the girls make it to their lessons on time every morning and they don't flaunt the fact that he's letting them break mourning.

But the secret of the dancing has to come out because the king has a problem — Azalea is of marriageable age, but because of mourning, can't meet any potential gentlemen (either lords or landed gentry) who might want to be her suitors. So the king uses the mystery of where the girls go dancing at night as a means of bringing guys over to the castle.

Officially, it's Royal Business, which is allowed during mourning. Unofficially, it's an opportunity for two things: the girls get to go outside for fun, which is also prohibited by mourning, and Azalea gets to meet some guys. The thing I like about this is that the suitors aren't promised Azalea's hand in marriage — they just get to spend time with the princesses. The king's official rule about his daughters' marriages is that they'll never be forced to marry someone they don't like. Which I love.

And this brings me to three of the suitors! Now, for the record, some of these guys who show up are pretty smarmy. The first guy to arrive, Mr. Hyette, gets thrown out of the palace because he dared to peek at the girls when they weren’t wearing shoes or stockings (which back then was like peeking at a girl in her underpants) and then had the audacity to laugh about it. What a moron. And then there were certain nice guys who came because they knew the king wanted a chance to let his daughters of the house and so they're just there to help, not because they want anything. Unfortunately they're the minority.

BUT!

Three of the suitors are wonderful boys! Well, one of them is a man, but the other two are boys. Lord John Bradford, Lord Edward Haftenravenscher, and Prime Minister Fairweller (whose first name we never learn…hmmm…) are the three favorites among the "suitors."

Lord John Bradford, whose father was the former prime minister, is obviously madly in love with Azalea, and he can dance! He's not great at it, but he's got this talent for compensating for Azalea's rare weak points, and he leads very well. He's just a sweet guy, and he puts up with a lot of chuff from Azalea's sisters. He also risks his life several times to help the princesses deal with the evil magics unleashed on the palace.

What I like about him is that, while he's very much an adorable young man, he can step up and be a warrior when it's needed. You see him do that in the second-to-last battle when he literally comes charging in on a horse (along with the other two suitors, Sir John the Royal Physician, and Mr. Pudding the Royal Steward, who's actually kind of old, so that was pretty impressive of him) to fight the bad guy and the bad guy's evil magic in order to save the princesses.

And he uses words like "stupendous." I love him!

Lord Edward Haftenravenscher (what a mouthful), also called Lord Teddie, is a total doll. I adore him to distraction. Very much a clown, he's also sweet and generous, and he puts up with a lot from Bramble, whom he is very much in love with. She loves him but thinks he's only there because he feels sorry for her, and that turns into a complicated little subplot that thankfully gets solved by the end of the book when Teddy confesses his love in the most adorable way ever (here: "And you, Bramble! I love you!...I love you so much my fingers hurt!" and before that he told the king that Bramble was "the raspberry jam on his toast, the cadmium red in his paint-set!")!

And he only loses his temper (because he's depressed about Bramble) twice in the whole book, and both times it's because she's basically like, "I don't want your charity, I hate you, go away." Poor guy. But it gets resolved!

He's just fantastic. He makes a point to spend time with all the girls, not just Bramble, and he's a lot of fun. He's calls Azalea "Princess A" and Hollyhock "Hollyhocky," which she just loves. Unfortunately he wears this horrendous lime-green bowtie, but the rest of him is so adorable I don't even care. And even though he's a bit of a goof, he joins in on the charging-into-battle-on-the-horse thing along with Lord Bradford, which shows he can be serious when needed.

The third and most unlikely of the three suitors is Lord Fairweller, who's actually a marvelous dancer ("To [Azalea's] surprise, he was a masterful dancer. He swept her along the dance floor, guiding her about the corners and between skirts, flowing perfectly with the music. In fact, the only thing wrong with dancing with Fairweller was…well, dancing with Fairweller.") and it turns out a wonderful man, though at first he seems very stern and standoffish. You find out all kinds of wonderful things about him from the girl he's in love — Princess Clover.

She's a bit young for him (he's actually considered really young for a Prime Minister; I think he's in his twenties, and she's fifteen, which would be gross except she went after him; took her over a year to get him to agree to marry her despite the age-gap, and at fifteen she's considered an adult) but they're actually very sweet together and he's the perfect gentleman. The king was all like, "Not happening," but Clover can be very stubborn when she puts her mind to it and under the incredible power of the sweet-and-shy-but-strong princess, he buckled. Of course he did. You go, girl!

Let it be noted that Fairweller is also one of the men who rode in to save the princesses from the magical bad guys when he has no magic of his own. Just his sword and I think a pistol, but this is set during the time when pistols only had a single shot before you had to reload, so fat lot of good it would do him.

Let it also be noted that Fairweller volunteers to take the girls out for breakfast in the gardens (which they wanted) when it was horribly cold, and they made him carry everything because they don't like him much (food basket, blanket, etc.), and then when they finally got to where they were gonna eat, because there was no room on the blanket, he had to crouch on wet, frosted pine needles. The man deserves some props.

Yet another reason the man deserves props: when Ivy, who was like four at the time, got lost in the gardens (which are huge), the only reason she turned up safe was that Fairweller went looking for her, searching the little wooded park with his scent-hound for hours! And then he brought Ivy back and didn’t even complain when she threw up on him. The man deserves a medal.

So pretty much I adore this book. It's got lovable characters, it's hilarious (especially Bramble and Teddie, although Clover was pretty surprising at times, too), and I love the transformation of the king as he learns to loosen up and let go of the past. The healing process is very deftly woven into the story, as well. It's just a wonderful, uplifting book and I love it sooo much!

I only have three problems with this book, and they're all rather small. One, no sequel. Two, the king never really comes to grips with the whole Clover/Fairweller thing. I mean, he doesn’t make Fairweller resign as Prime Minister (he was going to) or anything like that, but he's like, "Azalea, we have to get her to fall in love with someone else before she and Fairweller marry in a year." Although when Azalea's like, "But they're so cute together," he just sighs and goes, "Traitor." So it's not terrible, but if things are tense between them later, I want to see it because it's probably going to be funny.

And third, the plot was a little predictable. Only a little bit, though. Part of that was Azalea's temper. Some of the issues created in the storyline were because she needed to learn to control her anger, but what I like about that is that she actually did learn to get a handle on her temper because of the problems it caused. So I both like and don't like that part because I kinda wanted to shake her sometimes but at the same time I totally understood because of all the stress she was under. A very well-fleshed character, honestly. But it did lend some predictability to the plot.

Because of that predictability, this book gets a 4.5/5 stars. It really does have a great father-transformation, though, and it's a very creative and realistic book. I love it; it's sitting on my shelf. Everyone should go read it.

Sincerely,

LA Knight

Some Great Bits from Entwined!

"Down with tyranny! Aristocracy! Autocracy! Monocracy! Other ocracy things! You are outnumbered, sir!

　Surrender!"　— Bramble

---

"What happened?" said Clover, wetting a cloth in the basin, and dabbing Azalea's face.

"She had a sort of fit," said the King. "I think her underthings may be laced too tightly."

All the girls, including Azalea, blushed brilliantly.

"Sir," said Eve. "You're not suppose to know about the U word!"

"Am I not? Forgive me."

　

---

In a billow of skirts, Bramble leaped. It was a

grand jete worthy of the Delchastrian prima ballerina. She landed right on Lord Teddie, who had no choice but to catch her, and threw her arms around his neck. Then, to everyone's shock, she pressed her lips full on his.

"Oh...my," said Clover.

No one seemed more surprised than Lord Teddie who stumbled back under Bramble's assault."　

---

"I can be agreeable," said Fairweller. "If the other party is."

"Oh, well," said Bramble. "There goes that, then."

　

---

"Honestly, we don't kick or bite or throw potatoes at all our guests."

A crooked smile touched Lord Bradford's lips.

"Your family has spirit," he said, taking his hat from Azalea. "I enjoyed the evening."

"Well, yes, you've just come from a war," said Azalea."

---

"What did Fairweller say? When you delivered the [love] note [from Lady Caversham]?"

"Oh," said Clover, calming a little. "Well...nothing, actually. I sort of...accidentally...tore it to pieces."

"Accidentally," Azalea echoed.

"And threw it into the fire," said Clover.

"Oh."

　

---

"She looked at him, his soft brown eyes and tall form, and contemplated raising herself on her toes and kissing his ear, or his cheek...

Instead, impulsively before leaving, she reached up and smoothed his mussed hair.

Mr. Bradford beamed."

　

---

"He was shockingly easy to follow. The pressure of his hand, the step of his foot, the angle of his frame... it was like reading his mind. When he leaned right, they turned in perfect unison. He swept her across the gallery in a quick three, a dizzying pace. Gilded frames and glass cases and the window blurred in her vision, and Azalea spun out, her skirts pulling and poofing around her, before he caught her and brought her back into dance position. She could almost hear music playing, swelling inside of her.

Mother had once told her about this perfect twining into one. She called it interweave, and said it was hard to do, for it took the perfect matching of the partners’ strengths to overshadow each other’s weaknesses, meshing into one glorious dance. Azalea felt the giddiness of being locked in not a pairing, but a dance…Now, spinning from Mr. Bradford’s hand, her eyes closed, spinning back and feeling him catch her, she felt the thrill of the dance, of being matched, flow through her."

--- (and one of my favorites, the King as outraged dad) ---

"The King emerged from the library, paperwork in hand, eyebrows furrowed.

"Well, what is it, what is it?" he said crossly. "Can you not let me work for five minutes at a time?"

The girls burst into angry cries. Kale let out another piercing shriek.

"Him-him-him-" said Delphinium, pointing a shaking finger at Mr. Hyette, who laughed still. "He-he-him!"

"He-he-he was spying on us!"

"And we weren't even wearing our boots!"

"Or even our stockings!"

Thunpfwhap. The King threw Mr. Hyette up against the paneling. Mr. Hyette's head slammed against the wainscot.

Kale stopped mid-scream, hiccupped, and giggled.

"Mr. Hyette!" said the King.

Mr. Hyette struggled against the King's steel grip.

"Ow," he said. "I say, ow!"

The King yanked Mr. Hyette from the wall and grabbed him by the scruff of his fluffy cravat. He handled Mr. Hyette out the entrance hall doors, slamming them behind him. Outside, gravel scuffled.

"I say," said Bramble, in an impeccable impersonation of Mr. Hyette. "I say, I say! I say—this Royal Business could actually be quite a lot of

　fun!"　

--- (and one of my other favorites, the birthday scene) ---

"It was my coming-of birthday last January," said Bramble, gripping the handle of her glass, "and you forgot that, too. You weren’t even here."

"I turnt eight last spring," said Hollyhock, "'n I didn' even get any present at all!"

All the girls joined in.

"I was thirteen last April and it

rained on my birthday and I didn’t even get to wear anything special—"

"We turned ten—just two months ago—"

"I usually get a book for my birthday—but—this year—"

"You forgot my birthday, too."

"And mine."

The girls looked miserable. The King opened his mouth, then shut it.

"Sir!" whined Lord Teddie. "You forgot

　my birthday, too!"

Bramble gave a surprised laugh, then slapped her hand over her mouth, as though shocked at letting it out. The tension broke. The girls laughed sheepishly, and Lord Teddie beamed. He probably did not have many ladies think him funny. In fact, he probably got slapped by a lot of them."