The Night Dance by Suzanne Weyn

[meganbmoore]

 A part of Simon & Schuster's YA fairy tale line, The Night Dance combines the fairy tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses with Arthurian legend, specifically, Bedivere's returning Excalibur to The Lady of the Lake.  The Twelve Dancing Princesses is one of my favorite fairy tales, and i've always liked Arthurian legend, and think Bedivere tends to get overlooked a lot.

In this version, a soldier meets and falls in love with Vivienne, The Lady of the Lake.  They build a house by her lake and are married, and have twelve daughters within five years by way of six sets of twins, one set every nine months (OW OW OW OW OW OW OW!)  Things go bad, however when Morgan le Fay seals Vivienne in her lake, then hides it underground.  In the years after that, Vivienne, trying to escape, creates an underground labyrinth in the lands around her old home, filling it with lights and music, hoping it will one day attract her daughters.  Which, of course, it does.  When Arthur dies, he asks Bedivere to return Excalibur to Vivienne (as the legend normally goes) except Vivienne and the lake aren't where they're supposed to be.  He does, however, find Rowena, Vivienne's youngest daughter when she sneaks out of the mansion one day, and is determined to win her for himself when (as the fairy tale always goes) her father announces that anyone who can learn where his daughters sneak off to every night can choose one to marry.

Aside from the fact that I'm still kind of thrown by the heroine being changed from the oldest sister to the youngest (thought the oldest does still get some attention) I like this interpretation of the fairy tale, with the trapped mother creating the kingdom, and the daughters looking for her.  And while I wish it hadn't gone with the "Morgan is evil and nothing else" interpretation, I like the part of Arthurian legend they chose to focus on, and how they went about it.  Unfortunately, I don't think they really went together well.  It's like two separate stories that keep trying to mesh, but never really do.

Still, it is pretty solid for it's length (some of the mush stuff at the end kind of irritated me, but that's because I'm a "we whomped the bad guy and now we're getting married, we'll be busy for the next few weeks" girl, not a "our love is true and we are meant to be" girl) so I think I'll check out one or two others from the line.  And the Kinuko Craft covers are evil and seductive things.

Comments

[lotuseyes.livejournal.com]

my sister and I LOVE these books. I really enjoyed 'The Storyteller's Daughter' (Arabian Nights for the win) and the one based on The Magic Flute (whose name I forget at this late hour). The Scarlet Moon and The Beauty and Beast one (shoot I forget this one too!) are both not favorites and made me sad they weren't better.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I've had Storyteller's Daughter recced to me. I could tell I'm older than the target audience more easily with this one than I can with a lot of the YA I've read this year, but not enough so that it was really a problem, and even though putting them together didn't really work for me, I did like what was done with the 2 stories used, so I'll probably check more out.