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The Night Dance (Once Upon a Time) |
Author: Suzanne Weyn
Published: 2005-11-22 |
List price: $5.99
Our price: $5.99
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As of: November 23rd, 2008 01:19:20 PM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 Night Dance by Suzanne Weyn
I really enjoyed this fairy tale combination. I had always liked the tale of the 12 Dancing Princesses but always found them a bit lacking. Why does the father lock them up in their room every night? Why doesn't the father just separate the daughters into different rooms? Why does the father hire strangers to find out what his daughters are doing? Can't he watch over them himself? Why do the daughters feel compelled to go out dancing every night and ruin their slippers? Aren't they tired???
By mixing the fairytale with Arthurian legend Weyn has a way to answer most of those questions. The girl's mother is the Lady of the Lake and is captured and imprisoned by Morgan LaFaye. The girl's father, wild with grief at losing his wife builds a great wall around their home to keep his daughters from getting lost and never coming back in the same way. The youngest daughter, Rowena has inherited some of her mother's magical skill and is desperate to try to get out of the prison of her home. One day she stumbles into Bedivere, the last knight of the Round Table and the bearer of the legendary sword Excalibur. King Arthur entrusted Bedivere with the sword and the mission to return it to the Enchanted Lake and the lady that lives there. Bedivere and Rowena fall instantly in love.
The sisters are eager to escape in the same way Rowena did but their father discovered her exit route and blocked it off. Instead the girls escape into tunnels and caves under their home and discover a lake deep underground. Unbeknownst to them that lake is where their mother is imprisoned. In an effort to distract the girls, Morgan LaFaye weaves a spell that changes their nightclothes into fine ballgowns and for barges to take the girls to a magical island on the lake where they can eat, drink and dance all night long. When they come home in the morning their slippers are ruined and their father is upset at them have left without his knowledge and the fact that he has to foot the bill (pun intended) for their ruined slippers.
Rowena is upset that she can't get back to Bedivere and she suspects her mother is captive beneath the lake but each time she goes down to the caves she is drawn off in the barges and forgets about her intention to search the lake. Finally the girl's father calls for his infamous contest of wits to see which man can figure out how his daughters are getting out every night and in return win one of their hand's in marriage. Luckily Bedivere manages to snag the card that shows he is the suitor for the second night of the trial (or the book might have gone on for far too long) and is able to help set the Lady of the Lake free, return Excalibur to her and win fair lady Rowena's hand and heart.
It's a charming retelling even if it does have a few flaws. As some other reviewers have noted the character development is a little lacking - only two of the sisters have any real role to play and the others are basically about as animated as store manniquins. We don't really get to see much of anyone's reasoning for anything although much of it is implied. On the whole it's not as good as some of the other stories from Weyn but it definitely is worth a quick read.
A Fairy Tale explained
Night Dance is an interesting tale of the 12 Dancing Princesses combined with the legend of King Arthur. It takes on the more modern version of the fairy tale with the one armed soldier ending up with the princess, but the tale itself becomes more explained. It gives a reason why the father locked up the daughters and how the island came to be, though the ending seems a little rushed. It better develops the personalities of the princesses and shows why the knight picked the youngest, plus having more action and magic. Besides the ending, the only corny part was when the island was created, but it least is explained throughly and for what reason. If you enjoy this series or fairy tales, this is a must read.
 It must have been the shoe bill...
Lately, I've been exploring the world of rewritten and revised children's stories, most of which are the fairy tales that most of us grew up with. One of my favorites is by Hans Christian Anderson, about the twelve princesses who drove their father mad by appearing every morning with their slippers in tatters -- after being locked in their bedroom every night.
Sir Ethan finds himself chasing a boar in the middle of a dense forest when the boar rolls on the ground, creating a lake and transforming into a beautiful woman. She is Vivienne, a sorceress from Avalon, and both she and Sir Ethan fall in love with one another. Sir Ethan settles down with her, and builds a home of peace, while Vivienne quickly drops a litter of twins every year, each one a girl, until six years have passed, and there are twelve little girls about the place, that she calls her 'princesses.'
But when the youngest pair are toddlers, Vivienne is wandering in the woods near her home, when she is attacked by her sister, the wicked Morgan La Fay. Morgan imprisons Vivienne in the lake, creating a barrier that prevents her from either returning to the mortal world, or going on to Avalon. And heartbroken Sir Ethan finds himself with twelve motherless daughters to raise.
Thinking that Vivienne has willingly abandoned him and his daughters, he decides to imprison his children in his manor house, by enclosing them in high walls, and never letting them enter the outside world. And the youngest, Rowena, grows up filled with a hunger to break out of the walls that surround her.
When she finds a crack in the wall, she steathily chips away at it until she can escape into the woods. There she meets the one survivor of King Arthur's Round Table -- Bedivere, wounded in mind and spirit, and seeking to return the sword Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake.
How it all ties into the twelve princesses who slip away at night to dance their slippers to shreds is the second half of this short novel. There's not a lot of humor -- save for some antics by Morgan trying to disguise herself as a mouse to discover how to imprison Vivienne and her daughters for good -- and due to the fact that the novel is under two hundred pages in length does not leave a lot of room for character development.
That's one of the major flaws of the novel. While it does have a strong start to the story, by the end, it has all fallen apart. The imagry isn't that vivid, and the entire narrative is forced. The princesses are little more than cyphers, with only the eldest, Eleanore, and the youngest, Rowena, having any sort of things to do besides looking pretty and being rather simple. Even Morgan and Vivienne are rather lifeless, and Bedivere isn't much more than a handsome stud for Rowena to fall instantly in love with, but there isn't any underlaying passion to explain why they fall for one another.
Marketed for young adults in a series called "Once Upon a Time...," I found this one to be a grave disappointment. There's some magic, and the bare bones of the story, but author Suzanne Weyn seems to be having a hard time deciding if she is writing a novel set in the Arthurian mythos, or reworking a classic fairy tale. Robin McKinley in her anthology The Door in the Hedge did a far finer retelling of the story, with far more mystery and magic to it, and in far fewer pages as well.
Summing up, I would only recommend this if you have a teenage reader who is entertained by fairy tales, but otherwise, stay with the original story. It's far more entertaining.
 Poke me in the eye! It would be less painful than reading this book!
I had high hopes for this book, I really enjoyed the books written by Dokey, so I figured I would like this book as well. I was wrong...sadly...The first paragraph of the book killed me...usually I don't even pick up books that I would even suspect would annoying me from the beginning like that. Could you get anymore....I don't know...the whole thing stunk of cheap romance novels...was I expecting too much in the first place? The author tries to stuff each paragraph with so many adjectives etc...it's frustrating. I felt like screaming "I CAN WRITE BETTER THAN THIS!" to the book....
Plus the whole bit about the main girl liking the armored guy before she knew/saw what he looked like...it's a bit much...I'm not being shallow...but how can you fall instantly in love with someone you don't know/can't see...and then they start going at it the second they meet for real...geez...
I couldn't bring myself to read the rest...It is a poorly written book, that I would not reccomend...
However, if you like fairy tales (complete obsession would probably be the only way to get through it), and if you like romance novels, and you do not mind bad writing...go for it...I suggest you check it out through the library...(Thank goodness that's what I did...)
-Good Luck!
 Wonderful concept, poor execution
The concept of this book is brilliant: a melding of the fairy tale `The twelve dancing princesses' with some of the legends about the death of King Arthur. Unfortunately, Ms. Weyn's writing skills were not up to the task she set herself. Her prose is consistently stilted and overly ornate with such sentences as: "Rowena still sympathized with the trapped restlessness she knew her sister felt." and "There was a murmur of approval as this seemed like a fun enterprise."
Once I started reading, the story was compelling enough to pull me through. So, if you are willing to endure less than perfect writing for a good story, by all means read this book. If, however, you are like me and would be pained every time you read a sentence like the above, I advise you to skip this one and read `The twelve dancing princesses' by Robin McKinley.
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