Juliet Marillier, Wildwood Dancing (Knopf, 2007)
Juliet Marillier's Wildwood Dancing has all the elements of classic European fairytale -- adventure, tests of courage and faith, choices made and promises broken -- all against the backdrop of a deep, mysterious wood, an ancient castle, and a magic portal to a faerie world populated with myriad creatures of myth and legend.
Jenica, second-eldest of five sisters, narrates. She tells of the secret passage she and her sisters open every month with the full moon, and how the five of them, accompanied by Jenica's best friend and constant companion Gogu the frog (she sews extra pockets in the depths of her gowns to accommodate his damp bulk), put on their finery and their dancing slippers and venture to the Other Kingdom and the court of the Fairy Queen. They dance the night away, partnered by giants and dwarfs and sprites and elves and countless other immortal forest creatures. When the night is done and dancing over, the weary sisters are escorted back across the Bright Between to their own world, where they transport themselves through the hidden portal to their bedroom and fall asleep with the coming of dawn. It has gone thus for nine years.
Jenica's older sister Tatiana turns sixteen, and Jenica -- the sensible and cautious one -- can feel the subtle shift in the tone of wildwood dancing from childish innocence to something indefinably different, at least for the older girls. At fifteen, she bears the weight of responsibility for the household when her merchant father departs for warmer climates to restore his health. When her bullying male cousin usurps the household finances and begins to censure the sisters for their hoydenish ways, Jenica feels her control slipping. When Tatiana falls in love with one of the Night People -- those darker denizens of the Other Kingdom -- whom Jenica suspects of being a vampire, worlds on both sides of the fairy portal suddenly pose problems with no ready solutions.
Wildwood Dancing would make a fabulous, if ambitious, movie. The world of the Fairy Queen and the cusp-of-womanhood heroine with adult responsibilities reminded me of Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth. The overall story is considerably less dark, and suitable for younger audiences as well as adult ones, but a similar energy pulses through the pages, especially after the first couple of chapters. There are life and death choices to be made, and those witch-of-the-wood types will insist on complicating everything so! Speaking in riddles and rendering key players mute make for a considerably more difficult game than strictly necessary.
But there it is: the fairytale. "Everything comes with a price" is an underlying theme here. What good fairytale -- or coming-of-age tale -- would be complete without it? To grow up, you must leave something of childhood behind: something like wildwood dancing.
