Entwined

Once in a while I read something my kids have been reading. For Barret, I read Brian Jacques. For Perry, it was City of Ember. For the girls it was Twilight. Courtney showed me a book recently: Entwined by Heather Dixon. I flashed through it once, to check it out, and got hooked like a trout.

My first impression was that Azalea and her sisters were annoyingly not my idea of real princesses. My mind kept trying to cram them into my own (stilted) princess mold and seeing my daughters' annoying Barbie 12 Dancing Princesses movie (which makes me barf just thinking of it). For pages and pages I kicked against this preconception until I finally broke the mold and just enjoyed the story.

The story was fresh and gripping. I was over-joyed not to have to deal with excessive gore, bad language, and premarital sex. Even so, this book boasted of a nightmarish villain, who could scare me without drenching me in gobbets of flesh, and had me reading long past when I should have been up and doing things.

There was a sweetness to this story, bound up in sorrow for a mother who had died, and for a father who could not seem to find his way out of the maze of his loss enough to recognize his daughters. Like a rose, the relationship blossoms into something poignantly beautiful.

I like that. I like that the characters have their own personalities. The main characters are delightfully four dimensional. I felt like one of their magical tea cups, with the ability to watch it all unfold.

Hooray for Heather Dixon!