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kiralovesreading's review
adventurous
lighthearted
mysterious
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
mjfmjfmjf's review against another edition
3.0
Collage art, sigh, rarely a fan. A pretty good retelling of a classic tale. Unfortunately there isn't much to the tale. The setting frames as a little different. And the art is different but being collage art, I don't get much from it. That said, the art does seem good. All in all this one is okay, but not great.
panda_incognito's review against another edition
2.0
I thought that an African retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" would be really interesting, but it's just a reductionist, paint-by-numbers version of the story with African-inspired art. The author did nothing to adapt the story to a non-Western context, and the illustrations are all close-ups, without any world-building for the setting or the type of dwelling that the royal family lived in. The art style is nice, but the book doesn't work for me as a retelling at all, and the wedding at the end is extremely abrupt.
jessalynn_librarian's review against another edition
3.0
August 2017 - I loved this fairy tale as a kid (especially the Faerie Tale Theatre production) but it feels less successful as a story to cut down to picture book length/digestibility (the soldier just chooses a princess, which bothers me way more than, say, the violence in Hansel and Gretel). I do like Isadora's illustrations.
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