Book Review: Entwined
Entwined by Heather Dixon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I am a child of my time, and if you present me with a darkly sinister dancing magician, a teenage girl in a ball dress, and fantastickal creepy ballroom scenes, all of the images in my head will look like Labyrinth. I consider this a plus.
Imagine the story of the twelve dancing princesses. Now imagine that you can actually tell the princesses apart, and they each have stories and personalities. Not just that there is a bookish one or a nice one, but Azalea is the oldest, and keeps everyone safe, and Bramble is tomboyish but also the one with the most puckish sense of humor, and so on, right down to Lily, the baby. I see that Dixon grew up in a big family, and I think informs a lot of the flavor of the book. The preschooler who is always hungry, the baby who likes to chew on things, the shy girl with an unexpected fierce streak, they all work together as a family to comb their hair, or mend the slippers. Older sisters help younger ones, not as "babysitting", but as an inescapable, loving way to live with each other. Not once do any of them wish to be free of each other. It might be unrealistic, certainly for modern girls, but it's very charming.
The dancing sections themselves were fascinating. You know that feeling you get when you read a book with horses, and it is just suffused with love and care and passion about horses, and their halters and stalls and withers and whatever all else? (<- not a horse person, obviously). This is like that, only with schottishes and waltzes and curtsies. I was just rapt in the dancing sections.
This is also a story about how members of a family can handle grief differently. Azalea tries to be as much like her mother as possible, while her father the king plunges into a more traditional, dire mourning, and behaves badly toward his family. I wondered if he was talking about extending the mourning period as a way to prevent himself from having to remarry. I thought the way their differences were highlighted and played off each other, and the eventual resolution, were very well executed.
As for the romances, they are all quite charming. I would say more, but I am trying not to be too spoilery. It is enough to know that as each of their personalities is different, they fall in love with different types of men. I was all awwww.
I could have lived without Azalea's fainting problem, but at least it's consistent with her losing her appetite and not eating anything.
Read if: you like romance, princess, fairy tales, or Jareth. You want a sweet, poignant story with good strong characterization. You are a fan of dance.
Skip if: you want sex in your romance, you don't care about dance, or you want a more adult heroine.
View all my reviews