Book #35: Princess of the Midnight Ball (Whitney Book 15)

Title: Princess of the Midnight Ball
Author: Jessica Day George

Most of what I know about the story of the twelve dancing princesses comes from the Barbie movie version, a movie Annie put in repeat play at our house for several months back when she was in preschool.

Now that Annie is well out of preschool, I can see her really enjoying Princess of the Midnight Ball, more, in fact, than any of the other YA books I've read so far. I also enjoyed it a lot. If you're familiar with the story (Barbie or otherwise) you know that the king's twelve daughters are under a curse. Each night they go to bed in their rooms, and when they wake up in the morning, their dancing shoes are full of holes. No one can figure out why, even though princes from all over Europe have come to the castle to solve the mystery. Galen, a gardener at the castle who has been unwittingly assisted by a witch to whom he showed kindness while returning from war, takes a fancy to Rose, the eldest princess, and determines to solve the mystery himself.

I think George's writing is beautiful, her characters are interesting, and there wasn't much that really stuck out as annoying while I was reading. Of the three books I've read so far, I feel like the world George created was much richer than in My Fair Godmother, which was cute too. I also enjoyed it more than the Fablehaven book, but I can't shake the feeling that my lukewarm feelings about Fablehaven have been influenced by not reading the first three books, and I'm not sure that that's fair.

One of the things I don't like about the story, which isn't necessarily George's fault, is that there are twelve princesses. Twelve characters are a lot to flesh out and make memorable. Actually, this is one area where I think the Barbie version got it right-- they named the princesses alphabetically, so even if each princess's individual characteristics weren't especially memorable, the viewer could still figure out where she fit in the family in a general way. In George's version, the princesses are all named for flowers (their mother was a flower enthusiast and Galen is a gardener, so it works well) but I felt like I needed a cheat sheet. Rose was the only character who was fleshed-out, the others had a single characteristic (musical or religious, for example), and I was constantly getting them mixed up. But that's a minor criticism, and a criticism of the original story more than George's rendering of it.