The Restless Girls
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"A riveting feminist retelling, filled with excitement, imagination, magic, and just the right touch of darkness." -Madeline Miller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe
From acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jessie Burton comes her debut middle-grade--a girl-forward fairy tale retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" about sisterhood, imagination, and bravery, lushly packaged and with beautiful full-color illustrations.
For the twelve daughters of King Alberto, Queen Laurelia's death is a disaster beyond losing a mother. The king decides his daughters must be kept safe at all costs, and for the girls, those costs include their lessons, their possessions, and most importantly, their freedom.
But the sisters, especially the eldest, Princess Frida, will not bend to this fate. She still has one possession her father cannot take: the power of her imagination. And so, with little but wits and ingenuity to rely on, Frida and her sisters begin their fight to be allowed to live on their own terms.
The Restless Girls is a sparkling whirl of a fairy tale--one that doesn't need a prince to save the day, and instead is full of brave, resourceful, clever young women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Burton's debut, a retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses," the sisters carry on after the death of their mother, "a woman of many words and driver of a racing car." Blaming his wife's death on her curiosity and sense of adventure, King Alberto secures his daughters in a windowless room with only a portrait of their mother, "as if to remind the girls what might happen if they ever tried to go faster than was appropriate." But a door behind it leads to a joyous celebration where the siblings dance until dawn. Discovering that his daughters' slippers are ruined each night, as if from dancing, the King demands their secret be revealed. Burton offers a richly imagined feminist fairy tale, laden with allusions to contemporary concerns about autonomy, gender roles, and power dynamics, that is extended in Barrett's lush scenes of the clever sisters and their revels. Ages 8 12.
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