Review: Dance Away with Me

Dance Away with Me by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hmmm.

I've been on a bit of a book downer recently, starting and putting down books, not really engaging with them. I started this book and it was awesome, fresh and drew me in straight away. I mean, come on, who doesn't love a young widow running away to the back of beyond (okay small town Tennessee) where she grieves and spends her days venting her feelings by dancing to very loud music meeting a grumpy billionaire artist and his ethereal, yet heavily pregnant, muse?

A former midwife, Tess Hartsong just can't get over the tragic sudden death of her husband and is locked in a spiral of grief until Ian North barges into her life demanding she turn down her music. Ian is a former wild child and renowned artist who specialises in big street art (he graduated from graffiti to more acceptable forms of expression), but he is blocked and everything he thinks of painting seems trite and ridiculous.

Almost against her will Tess is drawn into small town life, first with a job at the local coffee shop/magazine store, then by the local teenagers seeking advice on sex.

So far so good, then about part way through the book (for reasons I won't go into - spoilers) Tess behaves more like a fifteen year old than a woman in her mid-thirties, proposing a fake engagement/marriage, it was ridiculous and so out of character.

After that everything seemed a bit of a caricature, the mean co-workers, the bitchy Instagram-obsessed girl, the people living off-grid who refuse to seek medical treatment. Just one cliché after another. I'm sure I saw this film on the Hallmark Channel.

Susan Elizabeth Phillips writes so well that I was carried along but this was not one of her finest books in my opinion. Tess' deranged behaviour alone knocked half a star off my rating.

View all my reviews