Morgan was dissapointing as a villian-I hardly felt she was evil, it was just clear she wanted Excalibur. Bedivere had some interesting moments, but he was pretty flat too. However, the two sisters, the eldest and youngest, were the two that were supposed to stand out, and I felt their personalities didn't hold up. With 12 sisters, naturally most of them will be nothing more than a name, and that's fine.

Most of the characters were underdeveloped. However, the plot developement and the characters fell short. Of course, everyone knows the rest, about the worn out slippers and the contest to win a daughter.So the core idea of the story very much intrigued me. Morgan le Fay discovers this, and also the whereabouts of the sword, and so creates the magical world where the princesses go to dance to keep them from searching from their mother. Meanwhile, Rowena, the youngest of the sisters, seems to have her mother's affinity for visions and has begun to see a strange lady trapped in a lake. In comes Bedivere, after Arthur's death, on a quest to find the magical lake and return the sword to its lady. Vivienne's husband has no clue what happened to his wife, so he locked his daughters away to keep them safe from the world. She ends up being trapped in an underground lake by her nemesis, Morgan Le Fay. The mother of the princesses is actually Vivienne, the Lady of the Lake, and maker of Excalibur.

I was intrigued by the idea of this story, which is a mix of the 12 Dancing Princesses, and some Arthurian lore. This was definitely one of the more interesting ones. I'm actually using this fairy tale as one of the stories I'm going to tell for my Storytelling class in Grad school, and have read many MANY versions of this story in preparation. I've always had a problem with the lack of feeling that the sisters have for the men they end up tricking, causing them to lose their lives, and was glad that Weyn only had two men attempt it (view spoiler). Rowena (the youngest daughter) and Bevidere (the Knight) were my favorites, though. This makes him extremely overprotective of his daughters, whom he raises in a walled-in manor house.I liked how the author switched the viewpoint of the narrator throughout, although it did get kind of clunky in some spots. She's trapped in the lake by Morgan Le Fay, causing Ethan, the husband, to think she left him. The woman turns out to be Vivienne, the Lady of the Lake, and Arthur's aunt. In this story, the girls are the daughter of a self-made Count, who met their mother near a lake in the forest. This was an interesting retelling of the Grimm Brothers' The Twelve Dancing Princesses, which took the original fairy tale and combined it with Arthurian legend, making the boy who figures out the mystery behind the girls' worn out shoes one of Arthur's Knights of the Round Table.

The Night Dance by Suzanne Weyn