Princess of the Midnight Ball

Princess of the Midnight Ball is a young adult fantasy novel by the American writer Jessica Day George, published by Bloomsbury Children's Books in 2009. It retells the fairy tale of the twelve dancing princesses from inside the royal household, where the girls who wear out their slippers every third night are the ones who cannot speak.

Rose is the eldest of the twelve princesses of Westfalin. Each third night she and her sisters are taken down to the realm below the earth and made to dance until their shoes are ruined, and the terms of the curse stop them saying a word about it to their father or to anyone else. A prince who wants a crown need only discover where the princesses go, and twelve of them have already been found dead by the next full moon.

Galen Werner is the only son of a soldier and an army laundress. With the war between Westfalin and Analousia over, he goes to live with his aunt's family in the city of Bruch and finds work tending the king's gardens. On the road he shares his food with an old woman, who gives him black and white yarn and a cloak of invisibility and warns him that he will need both when the one she calls He tries to climb up to the surface. Rose notices the gardener long before she can say why he matters to her.