“One last dance, my lady, before I am never to see you again?” – 2.5/5 stars!

Attention! This book contains: invisibility cloak, magical teeth, silver, hidden romances, dance slippers, suitors, underground worlds, and secret passages.

Just when Azalea should feel that everything is before her—beautiful gowns, dashing suitors, balls filled with dancing—it’s taken away. All of it. And Azalea is trapped. The Keeper understands. He’s trapped, too, held for centuries within the walls of the palace. So he extends an invitation.

Every night, Azalea and her eleven sisters may step through the enchanted passage in their room to dance in his silver forest, but there is a cost. The Keeper likes to keep things. Azalea may not realize how tangled she is in his web until it is too late.

Yeah, this was not for me! I personally didn’t love this story if I’m being honest.
This is a retelling of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses” story – which I’m not the biggest fan of in the first place. In this retelling, in particular, twelve princesses were forbidden by their father to stop dancing for one year because their mother died and they had to spend the year mourning. Their father soon abandons them to go to war, and they are left sad and alone. But when they find a secret magical passage to a place where they can secretly dance all night, they decide to break the rules and dance the nights away!
From all the things I could point out from this book, this is the main critique: this could have been way shorter – it dragged out so much and it was very unnecessary! The pacing was really slow, and I quickly lost interest in the story because nothing engaging ever happened.
The characters were also pretty bland and uninteresting. Azalea was an okay character – not super likable, but not insufferable as well. In general, I think the characters lacked development and personalities. They’re all named alphabetically and after flowers, which I thought was cute. I’m not sure if this is part of the original story or not, but I thought it was a fun detail.
There’s a bad guy in the story that was really creepy, so it was uncomfortable at times to read when he came up. He was from the underworld, where the girls would dance all night to exhaustion. At first, he seems nice, but he turns out to be very dangerous to them and the kingdom.
Also, I guess there was some romance? Although it was mostly nonexistent – not a single spark was spotted -, which was a little disappointing to me because I thought this retelling screamed romance, but that’s on me.
Yeah, overall this wasn’t for me. The story wasn’t terrible, but the slow pace, lack of character development, and the overall plot didn’t make me a fan. I’m sure there are better retellings of this fairy tale out there, so I would skip this one!