Guest Post: Heather Dixon (Author of Entwined)

Heather Dixon grew up in a large family with four brothers and six sisters. She is a storyboard artist as well as a writer, and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. The Viennese waltz is her dance of choice. She is the author of the novel Entwined.

ENTWINED will be in stores March 29, 2011!

Wow! I feel pretty honored to be a guest on Fantastic Book Review. Tina had the suggestion to write about the setting of Entwined, to explain why the silver forest and the pavilion feel so magical and alluring to the sisters.

Awesome! This is story meat stuff. I think it can be summed up in one universal design principle: contrast.

At the beginning of Entwined, the girls’ mother dies. According to Victorian tradition, the royal family must all wear black, drape the windows, stop the clocks, and keep inside the palace for a year. The palace changes from a place dappled with sunlight and bright windows to “muffled with drapery, turning day into pitch-black.” Bramble refers to it as their “boot-blackened palace”. Worse, the girls are kept from dancing as well, made to wear heavy boots instead of light dancing slippers.

Pretty stifling.

More so, spiritually, Mourning is a symbol of their broken family. (I use the word spiritual here not so much as a religious term, but in place of the usual word emotional, as I think it better describes story narrative.) All the darkness constantly reminds the girls of how their mother is gone, and that their father, the King, has distanced himself even more from them.

So! Settings are bound by both the physical and emotional/spiritual threads in the overarching story structure. Contrast the darkness of the palace with the whiteness of the silver forest Azalea and her sisters discover, magic hidden beneath the palace:

“The scene washed over Azalea like a crystal symphony…Every bough, branch, leaf, and ivied tendril looked as though it had been frosted in silver. It shimmered in the soft, misty light…Everything sparkled in bits, catching highlights in glisters as she moved.”

Light doesn’t just shine there, it glimmers. When it rains (as an echo of the leaky palace), the drops are pearls. The princesses, used to their dark and run-down household, are fascinated. It even smells different. Sparkles are for rich people!

And there’s a huge contrast emotionally. While the girls are forced to follow the rules of Mourning in the palace, here in the silver forest they’re breaking the rules. They thrill at defying the King. They feel alive and comforted for the first time since mourning began. Silver forest = freedom.

Or does it?

As beautiful and exciting as the silver forest is, something is not quite right. It feels muffled, like a snowfall, even more muffled than the palace. There’s no sunlight. There’s something haunting and unnatural about the Pavilion and its Keeper. Although they contrast starkly, physically and spiritually, neither the palace or the silver forest is ideal. In fact, emotionally/spiritually, the silver forest is worse. And because of that, it isn’t long before Azalea finds herself entwined in nightmare.

Thanks for stopping by Heather!

For more information about Heather Dixon and her books, please visit her website here.

Check out my review of Entwined here!