Today I am going to talk about K.M. Shea’s Twelve Dancing Princesses. This another of the Timeless Fairy Tales, which are individual fairy tales set in the same world. In fact over time they have developed another world wide arc that is playing out in the background and in the Fairy Tale Enchantress series.
As always, beware of spoilers.
The Twelve Dancing Princesses is unlike many other retellings as it focuses very little on the princesses. In fact the main character, Quinn of the Farset military, gets roped into trying to break the princesses’ curse by her fellow forest soldier. Only a little time is spent following the princesses – three nights to be precise.
Since the Twelve Dancing Princesses is the 10th book in the series, it plays more of a role in the world-wide story arc than the books at the beginning of the series. For this reason it is less of a stand-alone. It is also less constrained to the traditional plot line of the twelve dancing princesses. Yes there are nightly dances and yes the king is searching for someone to solve the mystery (and break the curse). But this story is about Quinn, how she meets the young King of the Elves and saves them. In saving the Elves, Quinn also saves the Princesses.
Interestingly enough, the Princesses are not entirely blameless in their curse. Two of the twelve are the reason the others become cursed. I like that there is a greater range of characterization of the twelve princesses, however little time is spent with them.
The story is enjoyable and I like what it does for the bigger plot-line. 4.5 out of 5 stars.
When thinking about my review for this book, however, there were two things that I wanted to discuss. The first was the idea of authenticity – how much should a re-imagined story follow the original plot-line? Clearly, the author has chosen to take the Twelve Dancing Princesses in a different direction. She is barely interacting with the titular characters. Is this good, bad, or just a thing?
For me, I don’t think you need to follow the original tales that closely. In fact some of my concerns for other books in this series is that they tried too hard to follow our general understanding of the fairy tales which made for very clunky endings. These are good places to start, then let creativity run free.
I will make one additional note though, if your story deviates too much from the original source material – call it something else. I watched a movie that was supposedly about King Arthur but was so wildly different from the tales I grew up with it was abrasive. The movie would have been a hundred times better if it were called A Roman Soldier or such. To title your book in a specific way, like the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and then write a story about a forest ranger, can be off putting to some readers. They will expect one thing and get something completely different. Which is not the best example, because the curse and the twelve princesses do follow the traditional plot very well. The reader just follows a different character to get to the same information point.
The other thought I had while preparing this reflection was about favourites. The Twelve Dancing Princesses is the favourite fairy tale of a friend. She loves the different incarnations of this story. This, however, is not my favourite. I much prefer Beauty and the Beast. I really like relationships that start as mistrust and turn to love. But I also really like that Beauty and the Beast takes place over a long period of time. These characters learn to love each other slowly. So, it made me wonder, what fairy tale is your favourite? Which story do you read in all its different incarnations?