This book is a retelling of the fairy tell The Twelve Dancing Princesses. This story has always seemed a bit problematic, to me, because locking a succession of men you've never met before in your daughters' bedroom is a bizarre response to worn out dance shoes. (I mean, replacing twelve pairs of dance shoes each day is obviously a non-trivial expense, unless you are a king.)

Some tellings of this story deal with this difficulty by making the daughters' behaviour worse; in some versions, they are dancing men to death. Valentine deals with this by making the fathers' motivations worse; he cannot bear his daughters escaping his control. This, obviously, makes it a more feminist story about women in patriarchy, and removes the need for fairy-tale logic.

The story therefore takes place in an almost entirely mundane prohibition-era New York. I say 'almost' because I do have a little difficulty believing that children who are not locked up would never leave their third floor rooms.

Any story which starts with twelve main characters is in a bit of trouble, but Valentine actually manages to keep them distinct, and gives all of them at least the broad strokes of personalities, and some of them a fair amount of depth.