Entwined ~ Heather Dixon review

Entwined
Greenwillow Books

March 29, 2011

480 pages
Amazon/Goodreads/Book Depository


Just when Azalea is of age to fully enjoy the beautiful gowns, the dancing slippers, the balls, charming young suitors and everything else that comes with being a crown princess it's taken away.

With the entire palace in mourning and the girls not allowed to dance, Azalea is trapped. Not allowed to leave or even go outside, she's also charged with looking after her sisters. Sisters who wish to dance.

Keeper has somewhere the girls will be able to dance and not be seen. Locked away in an enchanted passage that's long since been forgotten about, Keeper hosts dances for the 12 young princesses every night.

But Keeper likes to keep things and the girls might not find out just how high the price of admittance to his silver forest is until it's too late.


Heather Dixon's Entwined is a true fairy tale--not a faery tale which there have been quite a lot of lately, but a fairy tale of which, after reading this, you might just decide there need to be more. There are princesses (a whole lot of them! but thanks to a brilliant naming scheming on the author's part, they're easy to keep straight), a King, the royal household, suitors, etc.

Anyone who grew up on Disney movies (the true ones with princesses and balls and talking mice or teacups) should love Entwined. It is a re-telling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses fairy tale and seems to follow the tale pretty closely but is greatly expanded and so, so much more enjoyable because of that.

Heather Dixon's Entwined is like a Disney version of one of Grimm's fairy tales meets a little bit of Lewis Carroll.

Entwined is full of dancing, humor, intrigue, suspense, some maybe love triangles, and even danger. (Of all of the books I've read this year--and it's somehow become quite a lot--this is one of the few that's actually made me laugh even while I was admiring it's awesomeness or worrying what would happen next.) And of course it makes you wish you took a formal dancing class (or paid more attention in the one you did take!) so you could go to a ball and know what you were doing!

Very much looking forward to more from Heather Dixon.

9/10


Huge thank you to Harper for sending me a copy of this book :)