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I have just finished a marvelous book! Genevieve Valentine's The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, a 1920s retelling of the fairytale Twelve Dancing Princesses, which has spare but lovely prose, an excellent cast of sisters, a perfidious and sinister father, and glorious Jazz Age atmosphere.
Probably that's enough to make half of you run out and read it right now, but just in case it isn't, let me go on about it for a bit. The twelve Hamilton sisters live crammed in the upper floors of their father's town house. To their father, the girls are simply failed attempts to get a son, and he avoids them as much as possible - to the extent that he hasn't even met many of the younger girls.
But nonetheless he prides himself on how well he protects them. In his mind, trapping them in the upper floors of the house as a way to keep the girls old-fashioned and demure, far away from the temptations of the Jazz Age. He's so rigid that he's unable to see any other interpretation of his behavior. You might just as well try arguing with a statue.
Meanwhile, every night they can, the girls slink out of the house with dancing shoes in hand and head for the Kingfisher Club, where they dance and dream of better days - although Jo, the oldest sister, is painfully aware of how impossible that dream may be.
Most of the book is told from Jo's point of view. Her younger sisters call her the General: she is the one who organizes their nightly escapes to the Kingfisher Club, and she also provides the main line of contact between the sisters and their father. He hasn't even met some of the other girls. She is her sisters' protector, but protecting them from their father forces her to enforce many of his rules, and she is painfully aware that she is their jailer as well.
I love a lot of things about this book - Valentine's ability to switch effortlessly between the oppressive atmosphere of the house and the effervescent lightness (although with an underlying anxiety) of the Kingfisher Club, her clever updating of the fairy tale, her refusal to soften the father's awfulness - but most of all I admire her portrayal of the twelve sisters. It has to be hard to write twelve different sisters who have all been cooped up in one house for their whole lives and all share the same hobby, and yet make them all quite different and distinct. But not only does Valentine do it, but she makes it look easy, effortless.
Probably that's enough to make half of you run out and read it right now, but just in case it isn't, let me go on about it for a bit. The twelve Hamilton sisters live crammed in the upper floors of their father's town house. To their father, the girls are simply failed attempts to get a son, and he avoids them as much as possible - to the extent that he hasn't even met many of the younger girls.
But nonetheless he prides himself on how well he protects them. In his mind, trapping them in the upper floors of the house as a way to keep the girls old-fashioned and demure, far away from the temptations of the Jazz Age. He's so rigid that he's unable to see any other interpretation of his behavior. You might just as well try arguing with a statue.
Meanwhile, every night they can, the girls slink out of the house with dancing shoes in hand and head for the Kingfisher Club, where they dance and dream of better days - although Jo, the oldest sister, is painfully aware of how impossible that dream may be.
Most of the book is told from Jo's point of view. Her younger sisters call her the General: she is the one who organizes their nightly escapes to the Kingfisher Club, and she also provides the main line of contact between the sisters and their father. He hasn't even met some of the other girls. She is her sisters' protector, but protecting them from their father forces her to enforce many of his rules, and she is painfully aware that she is their jailer as well.
I love a lot of things about this book - Valentine's ability to switch effortlessly between the oppressive atmosphere of the house and the effervescent lightness (although with an underlying anxiety) of the Kingfisher Club, her clever updating of the fairy tale, her refusal to soften the father's awfulness - but most of all I admire her portrayal of the twelve sisters. It has to be hard to write twelve different sisters who have all been cooped up in one house for their whole lives and all share the same hobby, and yet make them all quite different and distinct. But not only does Valentine do it, but she makes it look easy, effortless.
