My Life in YA

Entwined is a very cute story, and a great read for lovers of fairytale retellings. Entwined is based on the fairytale The Twelve Dancing Princesses, which I haven’t read so I can’t comment on how accurate Entwined follows the original, or if there are some new twists in this one. It does however have that fairytale feeling; princesses, castles, balls and a dash of romance. Entwined follows twelve sisters, princesses to be exact, whose mother passed when she gives birth to the youngest of the twelve. This happens during Azalea’s first ball in the castle. Their father is heartbroken and doesn’t know what to do with his daughters. The normal procedure during their time is to grief for a year: this means that the girls have to stay indoors for a year, with closed curtains, and they can especially not dance! But dancing is their favorite pastime. One time the girls find a passage hidden by magic in the castle, where they find the so-called Keeper. He lets them dance there every night, but who is he and what are his intentions? The major plus for this book are the 12 sisters. I loved their interaction, it was all very sweet. With 12 different characters, you would think it’d be hard to keep track of who is who, but that certainly wasn’t the case for me! Dixon’s characters’ names are alphabetized: the oldest sister, also the protagonist, is called Azalea. The second eldest sisters’ name starts with a B (Bramble), and the third eldest’s with a C (Clover), and so forth. Besides that Dixon gave all the sisters their own distinct personality. She writes these personality traits very gradually, which I liked, because this way you aren’t overloaded with information about the sisters early on. I loved these characters so much that whenever one of their age’s are mentioned (the book spans one year of their life) I wrote it down in my phone, because I liked to know it while reading. Since my rating is only 3 stars, there are some things that I didn’t like. The first thing that I didn’t really care for was the romance. Dixon chose to have three sisters with love interests, but I found that too much to really care for the couples. The only developed romance was Azalea’s, the others are very rushed and one even came out of nowhere. Another thing is that I found some things to be a bit too predictable, which took away some of the fun. Besides that, sometimes all you read about is dancing Keeper’s passage, and there wasn’t that much exciting things going on. In the end, it’s a very sweet story, but I felt there were some things lacking which made me not really connect with the story. It does have a very magical feel to it with 12 characters who you can only love.