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

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The story involves Lisbet who is a pregnant beekeeper and who suffers many miscarriages, and many tragedies in her life. Her city of Strasbourg is marked by starvation and hardship. When one woman starts dancing in the city, followed by others and dramatic events, Lisbet starts questioning what is right and what is wrong. I have struggled to work out how to write this review, which is why I'm posting it later than I had planned. I've spent weeks avoiding it, unable to word what I'm trying to say. 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. The plot: Set in France, 1558, this novel follows Lizbet, a pregnant beekeeper who has already suffered 12 miscarriages. Her life has been marked by tragedy and the city she lives in, Strasbourg, is beset by starvation and misfortune. One summer day, a woman begins to dance. She is soon joined by hundreds of others, dancing in ecstasy and pain to the point of death. While this city-wide drama unfolds, so too does the drama of Lizbet's life, as she is forced to question everything she has ever thought about sin and love.

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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In the hot summer heat there’s a ‘Dance Plague’ in Strasbourg, it begins with a woman dancing in wild abandon for days, nobody can stop her and she doesn’t take food or rest, it’s almost as if she is in a trance. Other women join her……then hundreds! The authorities will bring in musicians to stop this madness and the devil in the women. Many of the women die! At the center of of the novel is Lisbet, a beekeeper who loves her bees, and has struggled with recurrent miscarriage. She has lost 12 babies. She has a tree in the woods, (a dance tree) where she has installed a private sanctuary, where she has ribbons to honor the past babies lost. Together with these two elements, her personal experience, and the historical setting, KMH has designed a story in which love, family relationships, cultural conflicts between West and East, and LGBT+ concerns and claims all carry a weight. 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:

Sunday Times, Historical Fiction Book of the Month Unusual and beautifully written, and the questions it raises about faith and love linger 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!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.

I was first intrigued by this book because I've always been slightly fascinated by The Dance Plague of 1518 - is that slightly morbid? probably - and so a story set then intrigued me. What Hargrave has done here has taken this slightly bizarre historical factoid and breathed life and humanity into it. Lisbeth has a tree, a tree that she calls the dancing tree, where she marks the death of her ten children. it will be the place where pivotal events in the book happen. A tree that marks lifes trials, but also happiness, solace and joy. The authors note adds to the actual historical events of the time and adds greatly to our understanding. A terrific book marking a time when women had no control over their own lives and had to suppress all their own wants and desires. The story is ambitious in its scope, involving natural occurrence, possible war, prejudice, and more. As much as I loved the Mercies by this author, I just couldn’t connect with this story.I loved the bee keeping aspects of the story and found the storytelling very atmospheric. A large part of the plot centres around outcasts and the hardships of women so it was also a very haunting story.

So, they danced, one woman started, couldnt and wouldnt stop and by the time this mania ended, over 400 women would be dancing. 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.’ Reading this book,I learned so much that I never even heard of. There are many different theories to this day as to what started the dancing plaque in 1518 in Strasbourg ranging from tainted rye in the bread to curses to hot blood. I'm amazed that this even happened! The most common theory is that they were cursed by St. Vistus (The god of dancing) for whatever sin they committed. Read the Authors Notes to find out more and what other centuries the dancing plaque occurred in. The dialogue, too, is full and resonant; Hargrave’s character portrayal is splendid in this respect. There are points when a character’s speech made me gasp aloud. Hargrave’s observational powers shine from the whole cast. There is not one extraneous character here. The relationship between Lisbet and her confidante Ida is beautifully written right from the start, tender and engaging. That between Lisbet and Agnethe, her sister-in-law, is perfectly enthralling; their pieces of dialogue together are some of the finest writing in the novel. Some of the dancing women themselves are given brief biographies that pepper the narrative between chapters, and this device serves effectively to seize tension and pull the reader through to the next scene, or – in some cases – to deepen our sympathy or empathy.

Lisbet is a sympathetic and likeable character who has faced great losses, and Hargrave truly pulls the reader into her life and mind. This may sound foolish, but I do still want to give her one last shot. Hear me out. I do feel that KMH writes differently depending on who she is writing for. The level of detail, the depth of emotion, the lyrical style... it all ramps up in her work written for adults, as compared to her work written for younger readers. So I figure that if her writing in her MG was too young for me to properly engage with, and her writing in her adult novels is too descriptive and lyrical for me to properly get lost in, then just MAYBE her YA is the way to go!? I do have The Deathless Girls on my tbr, so I'm determined to get to it someday and see. 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

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