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.’ 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. 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)

Vamos por partes: gostei da escrita da autora. É cativante, mas custou-me um pouco ler este livro. Tem um ritmo lento e arrastado, é um livro muito sofrido a vários níveis. Thanks to NetGalley, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, and HarperVia for this ARC. The Dance Tree will be out in the US on March 14th, 2023 **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! Kiran Millwood Hargrave is a poet as well as a novelist (and playwright). She is perhaps best known for her children’s books. Her book The Mercies, which I have not read, seems to take a similar line to this new book: both are based on historical events and tell the stories of strong women battling against the patriarchal and superstitious culture of medieval Europe. This book is interspersed with short chapters that describe several different women as they join the dancing, and we are left to imagine for ourselves what it is that drives them to that (the author gives her theory in her note at the end). 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.’ 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, and as she is joined by hundreds of others, the authorities declare an emergency: musicians will be brought in to play the Devil out of these women. He goes whistling through the house, closing the door a little too loudly. Lisbet has always marvelled at this habit in men […]. How they move through the world so loudly, so unashamedly, without thought for who hears them, or if they disturb others.’

In this gripping historical novel, the internationally bestselling author of The Mercies weaves a spellbinding tale of fear, transformation, courage, and love in sixteenth-century France. 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. 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. It’s easy to draw lines from then to now in attitudes to the LGBT+ community, to immigrants, to class. We have come so far, and not nearly far enough. […] The world-at-large remains too often a hostile place for people who live, look, or love a different way. In The Dance Tree, I wanted to offer my characters a place to be safe and themselves. […] Lisbet is my attempt to offer a mirror to anyone else struggling to see themselves, and a window to those who might need the insight.' I'm sad because I WANT to love KMH's novels. I think they have a ton of merit, and I can quite see why people DO love her stories, but they just never gel quite right with me. Sadly, the (admittedly beautiful) prose just isn't for me.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. So, they danced, one woman started, couldnt and wouldnt stop and by the time this mania ended, over 400 women would be dancing. 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.

This book was amazing! I loved this book and it is likely to be on my best of list for the year. It had everything that I look for in a book- a grounding in a specific place or time, strong and well-crafted characters, and beautiful writing. I asked for a copy of this book due to its setting in France in the 16th century. It blew my expectations out of the water. I first read KMH's middle-grade offering, The Way Past Winter, and I liked it well enough, but I wasn't blown away. So then I tried her adult offering, The Mercies, which I just didn't connect with at all. I then heard the premise of this one, it sounded so different and unusual, I was immediately obsessed and determined to give her another go... but again I felt disconnected from the characters, and my attention drifted. Kiran Millwood Hargrave explains in her Author’s Note at the end of her novel that one of the prompts she felt for writing this work was her experiencing recurrent pregnancy loss during our recent Covid pandemic. For this she used a peculiar historical episode that took place in Strasbourg in the Summer o 1518 when a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing in the streets, for no clear reason, giving rise to many other people doing the same, alarming the political and religious authorities at the time. A frenzy ensued; the drive to dance spread lasting a few months during which several people died. Documents are scarce so even today it is difficult to explain why it happened and the extent of the mania.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. Lisbet Wiler our protagonist is a heavily pregnant housewife and beekeeper who struggles to carry a child full term, heartbreakingly she has lost many babies, she lives on a farm with her husband Henne and mother-in-law Sophey.

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. Strasbourg, 1518, where the Religious Council of 21 aligns themselves as God, and will punish anyone who steps out of line in their eyes. Their intention is to oppress women and nature, and steal anything that makes money in a time of hunger and starvation. Sunday Times, Historical Fiction Book of the Month Unusual and beautifully written, and the questions it raises about faith and love linger 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.Not only was I intrigued by the absolutely stunning book cover, I also adore historical fiction therefore I was incredibly excited when I received a copy of The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.