"Entwined," by Heather Dixon

Audience: Young Adult

Genre: Fantasy/Retelling

Overall Content Rating: Clean

Content Warnings

Blood/Violence

Instances of bullet wounds

Wounds from war (not described other than the bloody bandages)

Instances of being cut by swords, needles, etc.

Overall Review

As far as retellings go, I wasn't sure what to think about this one. For all the hype that it garnered in clean book posts, I found it honestly a little bit bland for all the good things they said about it. Entwined is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and anyone who hasn't read the original or any of the other millions of retellings will most likely think it's charming... but I, unfortunately, have read many other retellings and it just... doesn't measure up to expectations on that front.

One thing that I struggled with in this book--more so than normal--was my seeming inability to tell the characters apart. Though all the twelve sisters' names were mentioned at some point (all of them alphabetically by age), I couldn't tell the difference between the fell of the various characters, and it made it so hard for me to understand and keep up with things. For at least half the book, I thought there was a love triangle that was making me uncomfortable and it wasn't until the end that I realized that I was mixing up characters and that there wasn't one. The sheer number of girls that there needed to be in the story to make it a true Twelve Dancing Princesses retelling is hard to work with well, but this one just... didn't do it for me. I would've enjoyed it more, I think, with more differentiation between the attitudes of each girl, not just their names. I really can't tell who is who.

Ultimately, I'm not really sure what to say about this book that doesn't sound scathing. It was a good book and it kept me occupied, but I don't think I'd really recommend it over any of the other retellings I've read. Most of the book is about the girls woefully going about their day, and the action doesn't come until closer to the end. I didn't hate the book by any means, but I'm really not sure it's worth a reread... And I know there are other clean retellings of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, so Entwined doesn't have the leverage against all these other books with that detail, either. Overall, I just was really disappointed in this book. I think it's been a bit overhyped and that definitely shows in how eager I was to read it--and how much of a flop it turned out to be.

The cover is gorgeous, but the story as a whole fell very flat for me. I'm hoping that someone will enjoy it regardless, but I don't know that I'd really recommend it to anyone on the off chance that they will enjoy it more than I did. I'm just sad this one wasn't all it was hyped up to be.