Princess of the Midnight Ball

Next up by Jessica Day George is my personal favorite book from her: Princess of the Midnight Ball.

This book is based on the fairy tale "Twelve Dancing Princesses," and the two protagonists are the soldier Galen and the oldest princess Rose.

First of all, I want to say that George does a remarkable job giving individuality to each of the twelve princesses. It would be so easy to leave the focus on Rose and let the others fade into the background, but George refuses to let that happen.

This story's skeleton is the original fairy tale, with twelve princesses dancing all night every night and waking up with tattered slippers and the king getting super worried enough to ask for help from all areas, even allowing a soldier to help with the reward of marrying one of his daughters.

This story adds so much meat to the tale, however. George takes the time to explain many things, from the origin of the curse to the details of breaking it to even having a separate section in the back of the book showing readers how to make curse-breaking charms of their own - or just how to knit certain items in the story, anyways.

I loved every single character except one in this story, and the only one I didn't love was not meant to be loved. However, part of the reason I didn't love him was that he had little to no character background or anything to help us get to know him. He was the villain of the day, while even the villain of the night had a background story and a reasoning that let us know why he wanted what he wanted.

Well, that was just a very minor complaint. In all, the story was fantastic.