This review can also be found at Carole's Random Life in Books.

I did like this book. I have had a review copy of this book for a very long time and I have to admit that I didn't remember a whole lot about what the book was about when I got started with it. I now realize that this book is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. I have a small confession to make...I don't know a lot of fairytales well. I pretty much know what Disney has covered. I was discussing this book with my teenage daughter after I finished it and was reminded that we once had the Barbie version of the story. So I can't really make any comparisons to the original story but I thought it was enjoyable on its own.

Jo is the oldest of twelve girls. She lives in the attic along with her sisters. Her mother is gone but she rarely saw her anyway. Jo is the one who really takes care of her sisters and also deals with their father's demands. The girls have one bright spot in their lives and that is dancing. Once the house goes quiet, they sneak out to dance at the local clubs. They know all of the dances and are quite popular with the gentlemen looking for a partner.

I liked Jo and respected her dedication to her sisters. Some of her sisters didn't even realize how much she gave up for them. I also really liked the second oldest sister, Lou. I loved the relationship between Lou and Jo and thought that they really worked well as a team. I must say that I had a really difficult time keeping a lot of the sisters straight and felt that they just kind of blended together. There were a couple of other characters that stood out in the story, like Tom, but I do wish that I would have had a better feel for all of the sister's personalities.

I chose to listen to this story and thought that Susie Berneis did a great job with the story. I think that she handled the character voices very well and the dialogue in the story flowed well. I think that she was able to add excitement to the story as well. I found her voice to be very pleasant and easy to listen to for hours at a time.

I would recommend this book to others. I think that readers who enjoy retellings or books set in the Jazz Age will enjoy this story. I wouldn't hesitate to read more of Genevieve Valentine's work.

I received a digital review copy of this book from Atria Books via NetGalley and borrowed a copy of the audiobook from my local library.

Initial Thoughts
This is probably closer to a 3.5 star read for me. This is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses and I enjoyed this story despite not really knowing anything about the original. Jo was a great character and there were a few others within the group of sisters that really stood out but at times the group could be a bit overwhelming to try to keep straight. Once the story really got moving, I started enjoying it quite a bit more than I had in the earlier sections. I decided to listen to the audio and I thought that the narrator did a fantastic job with this story.

It's finally over.

I wasn't really sure what I was getting in for, but I thought this story of a circus company in a kind of dystopian post-apocalyptic world might be interesting. It wasn't so much the story itself that bothered as the way it was told. There was a lot of jumping around between characters (mostly told in the third person), which was fine, and there was a lot of jumping around in time, which could have been fine, except that that the same events got referred to and covered over and over again. Sure, we got a few extra details now and then, or more context, but it got to be quite repetitive. By mid-way through, I was finding it to be a slog, and nearing the end I got very impatient. There was also one character that had both first-person and third-person chapters and I didn't really see the sense in that.

Finishing this book did let me complete my Creepy Carnivals square for 2018 Halloween Bingo, which finally gets me a bingo. :D

(Orthodox readers, this is not an Orthodox book, despite the title! I’ll talk about this a bit more below but I wanted to make it clear right away.) (Everyone: There are spoilers for Icon below. I couldn’t talk about what I wanted to in this book without spoiling it, I’m sorry, please don’t read any more if this bothers you!)

Oh, friends. This book. However this review turns out, please understand that the temptation to just add that Community “MY EMOTIONS” gif and hit schedule is going to be super high. Genevieve Valentine is really good at making me feel lots of things, it turns out. Also, she writes books that I possibly would not read from anyone else but which are so good that I consider her an auto-read author at this point. I’m pretty sure she could imbue the phone book with strong characters and a tense plot, also that I would like it.

In this case, Icon is a sequel to last year’s Persona. Both are near-future political thrillers, about the same main characters, Suyana and Daniel. I finished Persona and was astonished that both of them made it out of the book alive.

Well, they don’t both make it out of Icon alive.

Icon has a sense of narrative inevitability from page one, and a sense of tension and doom that increases to an almost unbearable extent over the course of the book. I both knew and felt that things were gong to end badly. I kept finding myself holding my breath until the most immediate danger had passed. And yet, I kept reading, even knowing I was going to cry.

I cried so much.

Suyana and Daniel are completely compelling, partly because Valentine has a keen sense for what to tell us and what to leave out. Asking the reader to fill in the blank spaces makes us more invested, keeps us caring, keeps us turning the page. In Persona, we had a sense of them as unlikely partners. Here they’re separated. But they keep fighting and fighting, for the soul of the IA, for the people they care about, for each other. They never get a break or a rest, they hardly have a single moment alone together, and yet their relationship is so potent that it becomes the center around which the story turns.

(I also love that Suyana gets to be calculating without being heartless.)

But Valentine is also excellent at throwing her characters into tense, impossible situations. In Girls at the Kingfisher Club and Persona, they manage to win some sort of space, peace, love. Icon, on the other hand, refuses any way out. I have always thought that West Side Story is more tragic than Romeo and Juliet, because one of them lives and has to go on living. In Icon, not only does Daniel die, and in dying save them, but Suyana “wins” at a horrific personal cost. She ends the book almost entirely alone, muddied by politics. She has done the right thing for the IA and therefore the world. It’s not exactly a bleak ending. But it is a hard one.

Now, I do have to say that I’m not a fan of the title. I understand what Valentine is trying to conjure–the complexity boiled down into a symbol. But since I am Orthodox and the word icon has a primarily religious connotation for me, and since that religious understanding is quite different than Valentine’s usage, it just…doesn’t work for me. I realize this is a personal issue, and one not every reader will share.

I’d recommend this book for people at the unlikely intersection of: invested in Hiddleswift (I have not even gotten into Suyana’s fake relationship with Ethan!), interested in politics, and the red carpet, and into Code Name Verity. (Weirdly enough, I feel like I know multiple people who fit that profile.) Actually, you don’t have to be interested in all of those things, or maybe even any of them. You just have to be willing to let these characters in and then let them break your heart a little.

I have said quite a bit about how much I loved Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine when I first read it. I am happy to say that rereading it only added more depth and appreciation for what Valentine is doing here. Jo is one of the most wonderful, heartbreaking characters I can think of, and I’m still amazed by how well the other characters are done, even the most minor ones.

Thanks to a comment from Kate in librarian book club, I really noticed the fairy-tale-ness this time through. Even though Valentine is playing fast and loose with the specifics, she also hearkens back to fairy tales in some really interesting ways. Sometimes this happens in the choice of language, which is deceptively simple and detached while actually full of emotional punches. (“It frightened her how deep her sobs could reach, as if someone was pulling sorrow from her bones.”)

There’s also their father’s detachment and unkindness, which is present in the original fairy tale (you cannot convince me that king was a good parent). It transplants surprisingly well to this setting, because Valentine is partly making a point about rich men who view their daughters as objects that they own. Another one of those devastating sentences: “He was always most terrible when he was trying to seem kind.”

One of the things you notice in fairy tales are the rules that the hero or heroine has to follow to survive. Sometimes these seem arbitrary, but they actually aren’t. In this book, Jo’s the one that sets the rules (which, interestingly, are given their own section as if to highlight their importance):

Never tell a man your name. Never mention where you live, or any place we go. Never let a man take you anywhere; if you take one into the alley to neck, tell one of your sisters, and come back as soon as you can. Never fall for a man so hard you can’t pull your heart back in time. We’ll leave without you if we have to.

The fact that it’s Jo setting the rules is important, I think, because Jo isn’t the usual fairy tale heroine. She’s sharp and angry and distrustful. Unlike her sisters, she’s not quite a Princess; she’s a General. I noticed this partly in a pivotal moment, when Jo is speaking to her father. Valentine’s choice of language underscores both the fairy tale echo and Jo’s liminal place in it: “Then it was silent, and when Jo spoke it gave her words the gravity of a curse. ‘They’re gone,’ she said, ‘and you’ll never see them again.'”

Because the other strand in this book is learning how to be free when you haven’t been, when your soul has grown around something dark and twisted. “I’m my father’s daughter,” Jo thinks at one point, and it’s true–but it’s not all of her. She has to relearn “how people related to each other, and how you met the world when you weren’t trying to hide something from someone.” She has to learn how to be a sister, and not a General. This strand hits me right in every single one of my feels. Her fears and struggles and desires are achingly familiar to me.

What’s interesting is how much of these same themes and feelings are present in Of Mice and Magic. Unlike GATKC, where we’re immersed in Jo’s point of view, OMM is told from an outsider’s perspective. Harriet, a hamster princess and adventurer, is the one who rescues the mouse princesses from their father. But like the Hamilton sisters, the mouse sisters love to dance “more than anything in the world.” And like the Hamilton sisters, the mouse sisters stand together against their father’s rage (“but still none of them said a word”).

I’m fascinated by the fact that Vernon manages to tell a pretty complex story about abusive parents and winning your freedom which is also totally appropriate for its audience, which neither talks down to children nor gives them more than they can handle. The mouse king’s selfishness and anger is shown clearly, but the emphasis is on the bonds between the sisters and Harriet’s resourcefulness in setting them free.

It all pays off when the mouse king is left in the ruins of his castle and the sisters escape to the world and freedom. The scene ends with, “and not a single one of the princesses looked back.” It’s a line that would be equally at home in GATKC, and that also resonates deeply.

I appreciated the way Vernon also shows Harriet, another princess, who rescues them and that the story gives us many different ways to be a princess. It’s not that Harriet’s way is the only right one. The mice will have to learn their own paths. To point out the obvious subtext, we’re not being told that there is one right way to be a girl. We all have to find our ways.

“The Twelve Dancing Princesses” has always been one of my favorite fairy tales, and I’m really pleased to have both of these lovely retellings to recommend. Although they’re certainly different in terms of setting and tone, their strengths and similarities in terms of theme make both books powerful separately and together.