A young adult fantasy for ages eleven to fifteen.
On the Island of Faranor in the Kingdom of Windward, twelve princesses dance their shoes to shreds each night. No one knows why. Not the King or Queen. Not the knights, lords, or ladies-in-waiting. When the Queen blames the shoemaker who makes the shoes, his apprentice, Phoenix Dance, puts her life at risk to solve the mystery. She braves magic spells, dragons, evil wizards, and the treachery of the princesses themselves. As Phoenix faces these dangers, she finds herself caught in her own dangerous dance inside herself--a dance of darkness and light--a dance that presents her with the greatest challenge of her life.
This captivating companion to the author's other Windward adventure, Aria of the Sea, weaves a retelling of Grimm's fairy tell of the Twelve Dancing Princesses with the tale of an imaginative young woman's struggle to understand an unpredictable, and sometimes overwhelming part of herself.
This is a companion volume to Aria of the Sea. Cerinthe, the main character of Aria of the Sea appears in the book as a grown-up healer. Elianna also appears as a grown-up dancer.
To write The Phoenix Dance, I delved deeply into myself. The book is a retelling of Grimm’s fairy tale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses. Twelve princesses wear out their shoes each night and no one knows why. Mysterious princes whisk them away across an underground sea to a palace where they dance the night away. The king promises the hand of his youngest daughter to anyone who can discover the princesses’s secret. Eventually, after nobles fail, a common man with magic help wins the day. I loved this story as a child—all those princesses! all those dresses!
Several years ago, I was diagnosed with Bipolar Two Illness, a less intense form of bipolar or manic-depressive illness. My doctor traced the illness back to when I was a teen. A light bulb flashed. I could write a young adult book about this, I thought. But my privacy, I thought. I was not ready to tell my story, nor did I know quite how to tell it. Years passed while I wrote my other books. Then one day I read the Twelve Dancing Princesses again. Put it down, picked it back up. What, I thought? What is calling me? I didn’t know.
I kept thinking about the story. Then one day, in spite of medication, an episode of my illness struck. Imagine yourself spinning on a stool, huddled, legs tucked up, spinning faster and faster, dizzy, sick. Sometimes when I am hypomanic—the low level type of mania that I get—I sometimes have bursts of creative energy. And as I spun and spun one night, thoughts racing and racing like fists pummeling my brain, the princesses popped into my mind. I saw them dancing in their gorgeous dresses, but dancing wildly, on fire, all night long. Like me. Dancing deep in their subterranean chamber. Like me. Then I knew. The princesses were manic. Like me. They were sick. That interpretation of the fairy tale was what had been calling me all those years.
But the princesses were ill because they were under a spell. I needed a girl who had bipolar illness because she was biologically sick. And that is when Phoenix Dance, apprentice to the princess’s shoemaker, leaped on to the page. I first saw her, an artist, when she was deep in the clutches of hypomania, frantically drawing shoes, pinning sketch after sketch onto the wall.
So I wrote the story of Phoenix and the Princesses and shared my experience with bipolar illness, hoping that it might do teens some good. I believe it is the only young adult novel with a bipolar teen as a protagonist. I tried to portray the story of Phoenix’s mental illness while keeping the reader entertained with the mystery and fantasy of the fairy tale.
