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Entwined with you plot summary3/23/2023 ![]() Frances allowed the name, the face, the person, to enter her mind and body. Indeed, Sedating Elaine is at its best when Winter changes speeds in her scene-heavy, primarily fictive present narration, mixing in Frances’ strikingly visceral memories of Adrienne:Īdrienne. Winter slowly tells this backstory, at times ceding long stretches to the history of Frances and Adrienne. Frances, we learn, is recovering from the end of her relationship with Adrienne, something of a twenty-first-century femme fatale, who broke her heart. As the book progresses, she is able to layer in more depth, both to her novel and protagonist. But it is her somewhat distasteful mission and overall ethos that makes her amusing, and which provides ample room for Winter to display her skill with humor, which she does often and with good reason. In an attempt to withstand her presence long enough to get the money, Frances buys one more item from Dom, a mysterious drug with apparently virile soporific powers with which to, as the title would have it, sedate Elaine.Īs this premise suggests, Frances is far from the most scrupulous, kind, or likable of characters. In need of a quick two grand, Frances invites the posh and monied Elaine to move in with her, so long as she pays rent, of course, in the hopes of swindling her somewhat inattentive girlfriend out of enough cash to save her from all manners of low-level criminal retribution. Living in her small flat and working as a dishwasher in a floundering restaurant, Frances is short on both specie and sanity, and the insatiable, incorrigible, inexorable Elaine only adds to her exasperation.ĭespite her general dislike of her girlfriend, Frances is forced to take things even further when her drug dealer, the amicable but businesslike Dom, calls in her debts. The crux of the matter is this: Frances, a self-deprecating young Londoner with a strong affection for alcohol and associated recreations, is entwined, quite literally, in a relationship with Elaine, whom she really doesn’t like all that much. ![]() The novel is something of a bait-and-switch (in more ways than one, as we realize later) in that the titular Elaine has but a supporting role to play. In her debut work, Sedating Elaine, Dawn Winter creates just such an antihero-rather, antiheroine-in a book at turns humorous, emotive, perplexing, and on balance, effective. But if fiction is to be an authentic-and, to some more than others, an entertaining-depiction of the world in which we live, then the antihero too is due his hour to strut and fret upon the modern novel’s commercialized stage. In the midst of the year of mourning, the three oldest girls-Azalea, Bramble and Clover-also fall in love and get engaged to be married.There is a rather odd aversion to the “unlikeable” character in the novel, as if fiction is to cloak itself in the sunny vestments of children’s television and portray the world only through the lens of those protagonists that pass some illusory morality test. The relationship with their father also develops into a more loving and normal relationship. As the novel unfolds, the girls learn valuable lessons in life from the dances they learn. ![]() In the meantime, the girls are learning how to make it through life without a mother, and a father who is emotionally absent. The payment requires the girls to find the magic item in the palace and break it so that Keeper can be set free. ![]() The catch is that he wants to collect on the payment for allowing the girls to dance in the pavilion. Eventually, however, Keeper reveals to Azalea that he is the former King who is responsible for "magicking" the palace. He tells the girls they can come and dance their hearts out at the pavilion whenever they wish. Keeper, who is the man that runs the pavilion and the silver forest, possesses magic of his own. Since the girls are forbidden from dancing, which is their favorite pastime, while in mourning for their mother, they sneak away on a nightly basis to dance in the pavilion in the silver forest. She rubs her late mother's silver-threaded handkerchief on the initials and discovers a secret passageway to a silver forest. Azalea stumbles onto a brick marked with the initials of the King that is rumored to have "magicked" the palace. When Azalea discovers that the palace they live in is magic, she also learns there are secret passageways and rooms in the palace. As the oldest, Azalea is also in line to become queen. Azalea is the oldest of 12 girls, so she promises her mother on her deathbed that she will take care of her sisters. The story follows the main character, Azalea, as she tries to put the pieces of her life back together after losing her mother. Entwined is a novel by author Heather Dixon.
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