Valentine Week: Fairytale Fantasy once more!

On February 12, 2024February 15, 2024 By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy8 Comments

Fairytale princess with ballet shoes and hearts

This year, DANCE your way to Valentine’s Day! Novels based on fairytales and folktales featuring dance.

In preceding years (you can find all the posts archived on my blog, btw–just look for February!), I have posted novels based on worldwide fairytales and folk tales, and on two “literary” fairytales (Cinderella and Rapunzel). This year, I’m featuring a whole week of novels based on fairytales and folktales involving dance. Here are the posts:

TODAY, Day One of Fairytale Fantasy Week: Entwined, by Heather Dixon–a novel based on the classic fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”

Day Two: Midnight in Everwood, by M. A. Kuzniar–a novel based on the story behind the classic fairytale ballet, The Nutcracker.

Day Three: Valentine’s Day itself! The amazing fantasy novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke–a novel with a strong dancing subplot.

Day Four: House of Salt and Sorrows, by Erin A. Craig–another novel based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”

Day Five: Dark Breaks the Dawn, by Sara B. Larson–a novel based on the fairytale ballet Swan Lake.

Day Six: Sexing the Cherry, by Jeanette Winterson–a final choice based on “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” but be warned–it’s nothing like the others.

Day Seven: A wrap-up and a special exploration of the “dance mania” of the medieval period, plus a free download.

TODAY, a review of Entwined, by Heather Dixon

Entwined, novel by Heather Dixon based on Twelve Dancing Princesses fairytale — Find it on Amazon, and other online and bricks and mortar bookstores

Entwined, a novel (2011) by Heather Dixon, published by Greenwillow Books (an imprint of Harper Collins) and based on the fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” is one of a number of recent retellings of this fairytale. The novel sets the fairytale premise in a vaguely Victorian or Edwardian but definitely magical kingdom, where the recently-widowed king has to manage his twelve energetic daughters. The daughters, all named for flowers or plants, range from the eldest, Azalea, who has come of age and will be presented at the next ball so that suitors may vie for her hand, to the littlest, Lily, just a baby. The daughters live to dance, and when they discover a full year of mourning will force them to wear nothing but black and give up dancing, they are distraught. The chilly king doesn’t help matters with his rigid rules and seeming indifference to their grief–and his own. Azalea and her sisters discover a magic passageway to a pavilion where they can dance in secret, but they discover there’s a wicked price to be paid for all that dancing, and a mystery to be solved. Meanwhile, the various unsuitable suitors cause Azalea plenty of consternation, family ties are explored in a heartwarming way, and the plot ends in a battle of wits and magic.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses–the tale

First of all, as in years gone by, I should mention what I mean by “fairytale.” No fairies are necessarily involved. The term has evolved to refer to a particular magical type of folk tale that may involve fairies, princesses, and the like, but may not. (A subgenre of fantasy, involving the fae, is an entirely different matter). And sometimes, what readers have come to know as “fairytales” aren’t any such thing–not folklore, passed down anonymously through the generations and centuries, often by word of mouth, but literary creations by artists hoping to mimic the fairytale aura. I should also mention that my blog posts on this subject won’t refer to anything Disney, except in passing. The Disney take on fairytales occurs in a whole world of its own, it has its faithful fans, and I don’t intrude there.

The original tale was collected in 1815 by the Brothers Grimm, nineteenth century German folklorists who were–and remain–famous for their efforts. Present-day folklorists classify this tale as Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 306, “the worn-out shoes.” You can read the original Grimm version in translation here. Later collectors of fairytales published French, Russian, Scots, and other versions. Some of the tropes (characteristic features) of the tale include the princesses numbering as many as twelve (sometimes only one), the shoes that mysteriously wear out, the magical place of forbidden dancing, the clever suitor who discovers the secret and wins the hand of the eldest princess. More disturbing features include the idea that the princesses are trapped in the magic dancing venue until rescued, and unsuccessful suitors may come in for cruel or downright grisly treatment. Magic and/or imprisoning mirrors may be involved. Any adaptation may include some or all of these tropes, or turn them topsy-turvy.

My thoughts on this book:

It’s fun to read, pretty light-hearted. I found it a bit too cutesy, especially the magic–dare I say Disney-cute? After I read it, I discovered the author actually works as a story artist for Disney and loves working on Mary Poppins especially. So if that’s your thing, you may really love this book. (It’s not my thing, but as my old mother used to say, “Everyone to her own taste, said the old woman who kissed the cow.” Or, in high-falutin’ form, De gustibus non disputandem est.)

How to read it:

I got my copy to read on my Kindle, although as accident would have it (no way to charge the aging device), I had to read it on my iPad instead through the Kindle app. I do love physical books, but I travel extensively and can’t pack suitcases full of them, so I have become a big fan of e-reading. Buying an e-book ON a Kindle is about as fast as you can gratify yourself. I had to go to amazon.com and get it there, because my iPad is of course an Apple product, and the iPad strives mightily to get you to buy your e-books through iBooks. So I had an extra step to negotiate, but once I got to the Amazon site, I bought the book FAST using One-Click. Then, when I opened the Amazon app on the iPad, there it was. Reading it on the iPad was a nice experience, even though I missed my Kindle Paperwhite and how easy it is on the eyes.

Valentine Week: Fairytale Fantasy #4

On February 11, 2023February 13, 2023 By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasy1 Comment

CINDERELLA retelling number 1

JJA Harwood’s The Shadow in the Glass

If you missed the introduction to this year’s Fairytale Fantasy series of posts, find it HERE.

Harwood’s The Shadow in the Glass (HarperCollins, 2021) is billed as a “gothic” retelling of the Cinderella literary fairy tale by Charles Perrault (1697). The first European literary version of the story was, as in the case of Rapunzel, by Giambattista Basile (1634), and it was “collected” by the Brothers Grimm and titled Aschenputtel in 1812. Unlike the Rapunzel story, though, Cinderella’s origins are more grounded in folklore, so its inclusion by the Grimm Brothers makes more sense.

Harwood’s version, set in Victorian England, is grim indeed. Amazon.com actually subtitles it “the Extraordinary Fairytale Debut of 2021,” a tactic only traditional publishers can get away with (in its defense, the book’s title page carries no such marketing language), and its ad copy on Amazon quotes a reviewer calling the novel “deliciously dark.”

JJA Harwood, The Shadow in the Glass, fantasy novel cover — Find this book at Amazon.

Hmm. Sorry, “delicious” is not a word I’d use. It’s a very gloomy setting, and all the characters are morally gray. Do I mind that? In this case, I do, and I’m trying to figure out why. Who’s a more morally gray figure than Walter White, for example, and Breaking Bad is one of my favorite fictional experiences of all time. Who writes grimmer–and better–than Joe Abercrombie, where even the characters we love most are grim and morally gray? No one. Abercrombie is one of my favorite fantasy writers ever.

Hardly anyone in Harwood’s novel is a sympathetic character, especially the heroine, Ella (Eleanore), the orphaned Cinderella figure who is menaced and mistreated by her guardian. She is fiercely loyal to her friends and goes to great lengths to protect them–admirable. But at the same time, she engages in more and more dubious activities and makes more and more dubious decisions for herself. I suppose you could say the same of Tony Soprano. Or Walter White. Or almost anyone in any of Abercrombie’s novels. And it’s okay for a novelist to write about an unsympathetic main character. Actually, the writer I was most reminded of during my gloomy slog through Harwood’s novel is Theodore Dreiser, although Dreiser is very American and The Shadow in the Glass is a very British book. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is a pretty unsympathetic character. This novel is kind of Bleak House Dickinsian without the humor and generosity. It’s Vanity Fair without the sharp satiric edge.

In the end, Harwood’s Ella strikes me as unsettlingly inconsistent in her principles. One minute she’s one way, another minute she’s something else. I’m just never sure how to take her. A good girl gone wrong? A person who was all about power from the get-go? And the “prince” character is a simpering idiot, so it’s hard to know why anyone would risk all for such a silly guy. I suppose she really doesn’t. I’m thinking in the end it’s all about the power.

Here’s the thing I really loved about Harwood’s novel: the Victorian setting. The novel is gloomy because those times and that London were gloomy. Everything in the novel is in a state of decay, mildew, and rot. I found that to be very realistic and interesting, and it’s clear Harwood knows what she’s talking about. I’ll mention just one detail out of many: dye colors in women’s dresses tended to run in wet weather–and so, given the weather in London, especially a London where industrialization had created rampant, toxic air pollution–women were in constant danger of having their elegant dresses go damp and runny on them. I found that a fascinating little fact, and I think Harwood does a great job of cooking it into the overall ambiance of the novel. I never had the feeling she was pushing her research into my face. All of it seemed organic to the novel. I really admired that.

Unfortunately, I think the very realism of the setting jarred, for me, with the improbable magic parts. By the end of the novel, those parts had come to seem more psychology than magic, and I wish Harwood had taken the novel more in that direction. I guess she couldn’t because she was too bound to the Cinderella story. I ended up wishing this book had been more like Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent or Melmoth. Harwood is really talented. I wish she’d write some kind of book relying on atmosphere with perhaps more of a magical realism twist than fantasy. In the end, I don’t think the Cinderella underpinnings of her novel do her any favors. Any favors for the reader, I should say, because apparently this was a savvy marketing decision. But maybe I’m just a cynical, grouchy reader. There’s always that.

NEXT UP: My discussion of L. Phillips’s Sometime After Midnight: A CinderFella Story

Two of my books featured on the LitNuts web site!

On September 7, 2022September 7, 2022 By janewisemanIn fantastic fantasyLeave a comment

LitNuts is a web site for book lovers. Two of mine, the fantasy novel Blackbird Rising, book I of the Harbingers series, and The Entwining Protocols, an SF novel, are among their recent featured books. Take a look, and stay to browse the entire site. It’s a gold mine of indie books.