The Twelve Dancing "Princesses" by S. R. Nulton, 2019

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Portia is a girl with a problem. Several, actually. The first, and possibly most important, is that she's been cursed. Luckily, she has 11 other people to keep her company. Too bad they can't ask anyone for help. And they are going through a lot of shoes while waiting for rescue.
Eric is a man with a mission. He needs to find his sister and he'll stop at nothing to do so. But what happens when he gets sidetracked helping 12 missing women? And how do you help someone without them knowing? Because these girls are bound and determined to keep anyone from finding out what's going on. Too bad he can't just ask them outright.

As I've documented quite thoroughly with my review choices over the past year, I'm a big fan of fairytale retellings. After devouring as many as I could get my hands on for a long time, I've started to become a bit pickier. I'm drawn to the retellings of the stories that haven't already been told a million times, or the most unique retellings of the more common ones. My usual rule of thumb is that the more famous a story is, the more boring I'll find its average retelling - just because I'll have read so many others that play with similar tropes.

Somehow, Twelve Dancing Princesses is one of the few "big" fairytales that doesn't quite fit that rule. While famous, it's not adapted as frequently as its counterparts, probably because of the ridiculous number of characters. And the retellings I do find are very rarely shadows of each other. The challenge of this story is so great that each author comes up with a unique angle from which to attack it.

All that to say, I'm probably biased but I had a lot of fun with this book. I know that on an objective level it's not a great book - I kept mixing up some of the girls, and the romance was a bit too insta-lovey for my usual tastes - but I got so wrapped up in the plot that I forgot about it for the most part.

It took me a while to remember all the ins and outs of the book's backstory, especially as I was reading it out of order. I still don't know if a couple of the minor characters were references to other books, to be honest. But that wasn't a huge deal. And it was fun finally getting a book from Eric's point of view after following three of his sisters in some of the other books. I liked him as a character, even if he was slightly too generally-perfect-soldier-guy for my own tastes. As for Portia, she was great. I loved being in her head when she was confusing all of the people around her. Her tendency to get lost in thought mid-conversation then pop up with some completely random comment made me laugh (and only partially out of recognition of my own tendencies).

Perhaps what I liked the most about the book was the way it tackled the difficulty of needing to flesh out twelve main characters (as well as the men around them). It's genius, really: Nulton made having a one-note personality part of the curse. Literally. As the curse gets worse, each girl becomes more and more extreme with a single trait until it becomes very easy to tell them apart. Portia is ditzy to the point where she can't keep track of conversations even when she tries, another girl begins to mimic others so much that she loses her own personality, some girls get an obsession for water or animals or plants, and so on. It's an easy way to give each character a single defining trait without the reader feeling short-changed.

Looking back, my biggest issue with the book is probably some potential that was wasted. Some of Portia's magic introduced possibilities that would have been very fun (if a bit cheesy) in the romance storyline, but they were basically forgotten later on. And we're told a lot that Eric is too protective of the people he cares about, but that never really seems to get in the way of anything so I'm not entirely sure why it's there.

I read this book on an airplane, and it was the perfect travel read: interesting enough to keep me entertained, light and fluffy enough to keep me in good spirits, and long enough to last a few hours. If you're looking for a 12 Dancing Princesses retelling, you could definitely do worse (though my definitive favourite will always be Jessica Day George's Princess of the Midnight Ball, and Melanie Celliers's Dance of Silver and Shadows is a cute retelling as well!). Do you know of any other 12 Dancing Princesses retellings? If so, put them in the comments below so I can check them out!