Title: The Girls at the Kingfisher Club Author: Genevieve Valentine
Published: June 3, 2014
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 277
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:From award-winning author Genevieve Valentine, a "gorgeous and bewitching" (Scott Westerfeld) reimagining of the fairytale of the Twelve Dancing Princesses as flappers during the Roaring Twenties in Manhattan.
Jo, the firstborn, "The General" to her eleven sisters, is the only thing the Hamilton girls have in place of a mother. She is the one who taught them how to dance, the one who gives the signal each night, as they slip out of the confines of their father's townhouse to await the cabs that will take them to the speakeasy. Together they elude their distant and controlling father, until the day he decides to marry them all off.
The girls, meanwhile, continue to dance, from Salon Renaud to the Swan and, finally, the Kingfisher, the club they come to call home. They dance until one night when they are caught in a raid, separated, and Jo is thrust face-to-face with someone from her past: a bootlegger named Tom whom she hasn't seen in almost ten years. Suddenly Jo must weigh in the balance not only the demands of her father and eleven sisters, but those she must make of herself.
Sparkling, boozy, and surprisingly subversive: in The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Genevieve Valentine retells The Twelve Dancing Princesses with feminist, 1920s flapper flair. From the cramped attics of their cruel father’s townhouse to the smoky basement speakeasies, this book follows Jo “The General” and her sisters as they take their lives into their own hands through dance. Written in unique (and highly parenthetical) prose and with excellent attention to historical period, Valentine’s novel stands out not only on its merit as a retelling, but as a story in its own right.
What I love most about this book is the depth the author gives to a fairly surface-level only source material. Fairytales are not known for their character development, but Valentine brought that to the table here, managing to give each of the twelve sisters her own unique personality and agenda. The oldest sister, Jo, might have been the protagonist and the leader of the “Princesses”, but her development does not come at the expense of others. In such a short novel, and in only a few paragraphs, the author manages to completely characterize each girl so that they are separate individuals, not the hive mind their father (and other men) believe them to be.
With this attention to characterization in mind, The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is a coming of age story, particularly for Jo, but additionally for each sister in turn. This is a fairytale in which the princesses save themselves—there is no prince who frees these girls from their father; rather, they run away and make successful lives for themselves entirely on their own. There is a prince (more than one, really), but they are more content to watch their princesses fight their own battles and intercede only when asked. Another thing I love is that each sister’s battle is different: there is no universal “princess experience”, one could say. And as each sister chooses to make a life on her own terms, they way she goes about doing so reinforces her unique characterization and her own unique goals. There is no one thing that makes all women happy, and the Hamilton princesses prove that in this book.
Jo’s character arc is, of course, the most prominent throughout the book, and I thought it was beautifully done. More or less imprisoned for nearly three decades, without any contact with the outside world, the sisters have turned to Jo as their leader—a “General” rather than a maternal stand-in. She gives orders, and heaven help anyone who disobeys. Though her younger sisters think Jo cold, it is more that she has learned to set aside her own emotions in order to look out for the good of the group as a whole. Over the course of The Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Jo must learn to both pursue her own desires and learn to let her control over her sisters slip. Her simultaneous development in both directions is subtle, and deftly handled on the author’s part. The novel sees Jo freed from both the physical prison of her father’s home as well as the barriers she herself erected as a means of coping with his neglect.
It is not insignificant, either, that the novel takes place in 1927, a period when women were, relatively speaking, freer and less constrained by society and by men. Valentine’s chosen time period allows the Hamilton princesses to achieve a greater degree of freedom and to express their desires more boldly. One sister might become a Hollywood starlet, while the other becomes a sought-after seamstress on Fifth Avenue. The options inherent in the period, as well as Genevieve Valentine’s skillful portrayal of Prohibition-era New York, give this historical novel a wonderful, hedonistic atmosphere that perfectly complements the feminist themes working throughout the retelling.
As far as fairytale retellings go, this is one of the better ones I’ve encountered. The Girls at the Kingfisher Club is gorgeous and jaunty, capturing perfectly the historical time as well as the attitude of the eponymous princesses. Nuanced characterization and strong prose set this much-needed update of The Twelve Dancing Princesses apart from the crowd, though it’s a novel that doesn’t need the weight of its source material to make it worthwhile.
