Angela Barrett: The Restless Girls

Jessie Burton’s The Restless Girls is a retelling of The Twelve Dancing Princesses, which relocates the traditional fairy tale to South America and gives it a feminist makeover. No spoilers but... look, simply saying there’s a twist regarding the identity of the soldier that’s brought in to investigate the mysterious disappearances of the king’s daughters each night is enough to clue you in as to what the twist actually is.

This is one of Barrett’s most recent projects (published 2018) and it keeps her within her fairy tale wheelhouse. Yet unlike The Wild Swans and The Snow Queen, which take place in the expected settings of medieval Europe, this story’s locale veers more closely to the Venetian colour and warmth of The Most Wonderful Thing in the World, with Barrett conjuring a bright South American coastal city, reminiscent of Salvador or Rio de Janeiro.

Just as Burton gives each of the twelve princesses a name and a special interest to differentiate herself from her sisters, so does Barrett create a warm and temperate world of the 1920s, where dark-skinned girls with natural hair wear waistless, short-sleeved gowns in a palace with open verandas, bright yellow walls, and views of white sand beaches and tropical trees. It’s a time and place that is grounded in familiar artifices of our history, with just enough fantasy touches to keep its fairy tale tone.

The oldest of the sisters is called Frida, and she’s the centrepiece of the book’s best illustration:

In the wake of their mother’s tragic death, the girls have been confined to their room. The two lines of beds are reminiscent of the layouts in Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline, with symmetrical placement of lamps and bedsteads, and the girls all dressed in black mourning – a marked contrast to their later outfits. They’re also listless: reclining, sitting, or slouching aimlessly about.

Only Frida stands, facing the reader, breaking the fourth wall, with her arms at her sides, shoulders straight, fists clenched, face stormy. This is a girl on the brink of snapping. It’s another contrast, this time to the portrait of her mother on the wall behind her, leaning languorously against a bright yellow car in a driving jumpsuit – the car that Frida will eventually commandeer to make her escape.

Barrett cleverly goes for a portrait instead of a landscape, thus reducing some of the girls to out of frame. Of them we can only see a hand or a pair of feet, and Frida’s posture matches this trapped, confined position. As such, the portrait behind them serves as a window to the outside world: a comfort even as it’s a reminder of what they’ve lost, and aptly – as the story goes – a portal to another realm...