Okay, peeps, there are a few layers to Entwined, so here goes:
- The Entwine is a court dance where the male partner tries to ensnare the female partner using a scarf that they're both holding the ends of. This dance was a favorite of Azalea's mom and dad, and she is excellent at dancing it (read: hard to ensnare). But when Azalea dances the Entwine with Keeper, he traps her in the dance—just like he traps her in his plot to extract revenge on her family.
- There's lots of entwining plant imagery in the pavilion where the girls dance, like this: "Around her, the leaves of the rosebush ivies rustled, then curled and entwined through the lattice. Their buds blossomed into fat, silver blossoms, revealing pearls for middles" (9.33). This is pretty, but it's a little disturbing that Keeper has the power to make magical plants do what he wants. It might even be a form of foreshadowing, since Keeper (as High King) will have curtain ropes and such ensnare Azalea later on.
- Since Azalea loves dancing, she realizes that when she has her first dance with Mr. Bradford, something like entwining happens between them:
- Mother had once told her about this perfect twining into one. She called it interweave, and said it was hard to do, for it took the perfect matching of the partners' strengths to overshadow each others' weaknesses, meshing into one glorious dance. (23.65)
- This is important since Azalea spends a lot of the book worrying about being married off to someone politically convenient, but here she finds that Mr. Bradford is a great match for her, someone she can entwine with and cooperate with—and who works out politically-speaking too.
So yeah—we're thinking Entwined is a pretty fitting title for the book, although we also like Bramble's way of titling scandalous events, like the Great Slipper Scandal and the Great Boot Bungling.