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The Dance Tree: A BBC Between the Covers book club pick

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The entire book pulsates and hums with anxiety, fear, oppressive patriarchy, and loss as Lizbet and others seek any little morsel of joy to hold onto in the age of repression and control. Phenomenal book and I look forward to reading more from this author. Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s writing in ‘The Dance Tree’ overall is taut, crafted, considered. There are a few spelling mistakes here and there (vice instead of vise no less than 3 times) and some oddly phrased sentences, grammar-wise, but this is an ARC and I’m hoping these will be repaired in the finished copy. This is one of those mesmerising reads that you feel utterly scooped-out and empty after finishing. Beautiful: Lisbet is a sympathetic and likeable character who has faced great losses, and Hargrave truly pulls the reader into her life and mind.

I found my patience for sentimental historical fiction, even the kind that is well-written and not cheesy WWII romance crap, had disappeared.This was absolutely beautifully written. It often felt like a dreamscape, where the writing created far more ambiance than detail.

It takes an age, but Lisbet is revived from her sleep, and she works as though she had practised for just this moment her whole life, a life that until now had been full of ruin and curses and blood and now is nothing but music and beauty and bees, her mother-in-law processing before her, anointing her path with smoke. She feels some of the power a priest must, giving each animal their place, clearing them of their panic, their confusion. Giving them peace. The unhomed bees gust and plume, making a column above the destroyed hives.’ Agnethe’s return coincides with the church making an unreasonable demand on the farm. And it is these two events that trigger and drive the story we read. Hargrave notes that incidents of choreomania were – if not common – recurrent in Medieval times, rationalised as religious mania, and what seems to me to be the nub of this novel is the fact that ‘[o]ften, the dancers were society’s most vulnerable, whether through class, age, race, or gender.’ Set in Strasbourg, in 1518, the fiction is inspired by a dancing plague which historical accounts suggest sent the city into a mania for three months of relentless dancing in the streets. The novel focuses on the pregnant Lisbeth, and the women closest to her, as the repercussions of this frenzy impact upon them in myriad ways as they are pushed to the limits of endurance. There is violence here: violence towards women, violence of hate; verbal abuse and emotional abuse. But the text is redemptive, and – I like to hope – not through a solely hetero-centric resolution. ‘The Mercies’ also suffered somewhat from the Bury Your Gays trope / Dead Lesbian Syndrome, where LGBT+ relationships are frustrated or denied fulfilment, either through death or permanent separation. However, Hargrave does conclude in her remarkably tender author’s note:The writing in this book is filled with descriptive and lyrical prose and I found it very captivating. It’s a story of female friendship, loss and forbidden love. It’s set in the year 1518 and based on a true story. In July 1518, in the midst of the hottest summer Central Europe had ever known, a woman whose name is recorded as Frau Troffea began to dance in the streets of Strasbourg. This was no ordinary dance – it was unrelenting, closer to a trance than a celebration. She danced for days, any attempts to make her rest thwarted, until it drew the attention of the Twenty-One, the city’s council, and she was taken to the shrine of St Vitus, patron saint of dancers and musicians. After being bathed in the spring there, she stopped dancing.’

Lisbet often visits a pagan ‘Dance Tree’, a place in the forest near home where she goes to grieve silently for her lost babies. Agnethe her newfound sister-in-law has returned to the family after serving penance for the past seven years …. for a sin unknown to Lisbet and nobody seems to want Lisbet to know what that sin is! Overall there is much to recommend The Dance Tree to fans of historical fiction who long for immersion in another world but prefer escapism that provokes further thought about the time and place that we do live in. Milwood-Hargrave delivers on this, and then some. Helen Cullen A personagem principal Lisbet é submissa, no seu casamento, na sociedade e na vida. Acaba por ser uma metáfora do papel da mulher na sociedade do século XVI e ao longo dos seguintes. Infelizmente ainda há muito desta mentalidade na atualidade. As the story unravels, I kept waiting to connect with the main character, but I couldn’t. There wasn’t enough of character development to help me connect with Lisbet. When I started losing interest in the story, I realized that the plot was weak as well. It seems as it’s more about some embellishments. The story keeps spinning, but I was missing character development and some strong thread to connect all those beautiful embellishments. Set in an era of superstition and hysteria, and inspired by the true events of a doomed summer, The Dance Tree is a story of family secrets, forbidden love, and women pushed to the edge. The gripping, historical novel from Kiran Millwood Hargrave, as seen on BBC Two's Between the Covers.

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) In her research KMH has relied on the study by John Waller A Time to Dance, who proposes the theory that the economic and social pressures of the time, when religion became a major source of controversy and violence, where the ultimate causes for the mass-dementia. Meanwhile, on a farm near the city, pregnant Lisbet, together with husband Henne and mother-in-law Sophey, is tending the bees that provide her family's livelihood whilst at the same time longing for this pregnancy to go full-term and not end prematurely as her previous twelve pregnancies have. Then Lisbet's life is disrupted by the arrival of Henne's sister, Nethe, who has been away in a mountain retreat for seven years for a 'crime' that no-one will speak of. As the family dynamic ebbs and flows, Lisbet finds herself increasingly drawn to her best friend, Ida, who has the misfortune to be married to a vindictive member of the local Council and who believes he is doing God's work, no matter how harsh his actions are. But Ida has a secret that even best friend Lisbet does not know - and, when revealed, puts Lisbet's family in jeopardy.... What we get in Hargrave’s second novel for adults is a story of four women, centred around Lisbet, a beekeeper, childless but pregnant for the thirteenth time, and a story of how these four women (Lisbet with her mother-in-law, sister-in-law, and closest friend) resist men’s attempts to supress them, confine them, to crush them as the Twenty-One seek to nullify the dancing women:

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