Twelve is a poetic retelling of the Brothers Grimm fairytale "The Twelve Dancing Princesses." Bewitching and beguiling, this short series of linked poems takes the reader to the underground realm and back, following the stories of twelve princesses and their life after the magic shoes.
The heroine's journey is vast with possibilities, the roads fork and then fork again. The power comes in the choosing.
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[It began with the shoes and the expense they entailed (PROLOGUE: THE SHOES)]***
(@IntFlightPress, 7 September 2020, e-book, 64 pages, #ARC from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I'd never heard of the poet before but I decided to read this because I loved the idea of a poetry collection inspired by The Twelve Dancing Princesses. I tend to enjoy fairytale retellings so I was looking forward to this. I enjoyed this book, a lot. The only issue is that the tales included her are not poems. I'm a bit old fashioned but to me, a poem has a very specific structure split into lines and stanzas. The tales in Twelve are short vignettes but clearly prose, not poetry. The language is poetic though. This bothered me because I was looking forward to getting lost in a collection of fairytale retellings in poetry form. I'm only vaguely familiar with the original fairytale so I'm not sure how close or different to the original Twelve is. Twelve explores the stories of the twelve princesses after the events contained in the original poem. I found this enjoyable and entertaining.
