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

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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.

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. Thanks to NetGalley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and HarperVia for this ARC. The Dance Tree will be out in the US on March 14th, 2023 ** 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.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. 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. 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. Strasbourg, in the long hot summer of 1518. A woman starts to dance in the market square. The dance is relentless, and soon she is joined by hundreds or thousands of others, dancing, without rest, until their feet are ripped and bleeding. Events of that year, when belief in God was absolute and His wrath was blamed for the dancing plague, have defied explanation. The character of Lizbet was thoughtfully drawn as a capable woman who was weighed down with the grief of multiple miscarriages and doubting her place in her home because of it. Her position is also threatened by the return of her mysterious sister-in-law who has returned home after being away, doing "penance" for something no one will talk about. Her husband had to travel to the council seat to try to save their bee-keeping business, which is the one joy and pride she has in her life. On a visit to the village, she sees a woman who is in a dancing-type trance which has captivated the village and is growing with more women joining in, to the consternation of the town and leaders.

The story of her birth is the story of a comet. At the moment Gepa Bauer’s mother felt the first pain of her coming, her papa saw it, a burning star ripping the dark sky for three days while her mother laboured on all fours like a beast, her husband and sons sleeping in the barn because they were scared of her pain, of the blood, of the wise woman who came with sweet mallow and iron tongs. To the east, the comet found a farmer’s field and scorched it fully, furrowed so deep those who were there said it was like a tunnel to Hell carved in the soil. As it tore the ground, Gepa was born feet first and the agony broke her mother’s mind.’ This is a fascinating read depicting a very different time, where science as such didn’t exist, the Church ruled daily life, women had no reality beyond their relationship to some man, father, brother, husband or son. It was a time of superstition but still a time of people living for the future. I recommend this book, definitely. 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. What interested me into this story was the time period of plaque in the 16th century Europe and women who faced the religious obsessions. Strasbourg, 1518. In the midst of a blisteringly hot summer, a lone woman begins to dance in the city square. She dances for days without pause or rest, and when hundreds of other women join her, the men running the city declare a state of emergency and hire musicians to play the Devil out of the mob. Outside the city, pregnant Lisbet lives with her husband and mother-in-law, tending the bees that are the family's livelihood. Though Lisbet is removed from the frenzy of the dancing plague afflicting the city's women, her own quiet life is upended by the arrival of her sister-in-law. Nethe has been away for seven years, serving a penance in the mountains for a crime no one will name.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. 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.’ I found my patience for sentimental historical fiction, even the kind that is well-written and not cheesy WWII romance crap, had disappeared.