Narrated by Nicole Poole
SEP is back with her first new novel in four years, Dance Away with Me. (It’s been a long wait!) The premise – a nurse/midwife retreats to the mountains to mourn the death of her husband – seemed to echo Robyn Carr’s Virgin River series, where nurse/midwife Mel takes a job in a remote California mountain village to restart her life after the death of her husband. But anyone who’s a fan of both authors can tell you, even with the nurse/midwife mourning heroines, these two authors couldn’t be more different if they wrote completely different genres in different languages. SEP’s protagonists are always a bit on the off-beat side, and she populates her small towns with kooky characters to match, while Carr draws a less humorous, more slice-of-life picture of small-town life and the romances of her main characters.
Tess Hartsong needs to get away to work through the grief of her husband’s death from illness two years before – and Runaway Mountain in a small cabin outside the small town of Tempest in Tennessee seems the perfect place. She has no other plan than to play music and dance outside, her own personal grief therapy, assuming she is miles away from anyone.
Ian Hamilton North the Fourth, however, is not miles away. Ian has his own troubles to bear, and he has always expressed himself through street art (aka graffiti, now turned to famous works) to work through his own rough childhood with an abusive father and withdrawn mother. After years of a successful career, he’s stuck. He feels too old and no long rebellious enough for the street art scene but he can’t see what is next for him. Like Tess, he seeks solace on Runaway Mountain and is none too happy to be disturbed by this new crazy woman, playing music too loud.
What Ian finds in Tess, however, is his muse. His art career has been stalled, and he’s retreated to Tempest to try to get re-inspired. He certainly didn’t expect a Dancing Dervish to be the key to his art. And he didn’t expect her to be the most stubborn woman – as stubborn as he was, to boot! – he’d ever been wildly attracted to, either.
Tess gets a job at the local coffee shop/convenience store and starts to turn the town of Tempest upside down with her “big city ways” – putting condoms in full view and talking to the town’s teens about safe sex has all the citizens in an uproar. But a dark tragedy occurs that forces Ian and Tess to work together through new grief, and this sparks a vicious rumor mill about their relationship. In the midst of that, some of town also start to rely on Tess’s medical background and they show up on her doorstep at all hours of the day and night for her help and advice.
By the way, this review is pretty much spoiler-free, but when you start the story, you may wonder as I did how the author could possibly resolve the many uncertainties that are laid out in the opening chapters. Trust SEP to find a way to make it work by the end. I’ve found that most of SEP books age very well and that I need to listen to them multiple times to really get to know the characters. The writing style I love is firmly established in Dance Away with Me – the quirky town characters creating real community, the initial attraction of the main characters leading to a slow-burn building of relationship. I was so thrown by the initial tragedy, though, that it took me a while to warm up to Tess and Ian as a couple, something that might be easier to do on a second or third listen/read. Overall, the story dealt with darker themes, darker than Dream a Little Dream in the Chicago Stars series, which still brings me to tears.
I wanted to like Nicole Poole’s narration more than I did. Overall, it was good – her characters are consistent, her differentiation between male/female distinct, her accents had the right local appeal. I looked back at my review of SEP’s First Star I See Tonight, where I mention that her earlier narrations had reminded me a little of Anna Fields, the narrator of SEP’s earlier books. But in both First Star and Dance Away, she often spoke too fast, with narrative sections a little too monotone. Her narration works most of the time, but her pacing made me look more than once to be sure I hadn’t accidentally sped up the sound. (Full disclosure: I actually did do this once, no clue how.) It was as if there was a time limit to be met. Maybe I’m just spoiled by the wonderful readings of Anna Fields, since I’ve just come off a re-read of 2 of them and the comparison is fresh in my mind. I wondered at the time if the First Star issue was caused by post-processing, like maybe they sped up the recording and removed pauses, but in this one it wasn’t so much the lack of pauses between sections as the non-stop, too rapid onslaught of the reading, so I’m not sure.
All in all, in spite of the speed of the narration, I enjoyed the story – it’s as much Tess’s journey to reimagine her life after grief as it is about the romance, with a satisfying ending followed by a wonderful epilogue in SEP’s trademark style of wrapping it all up several years later.
Melinda
Buy Dance Away with Me by Susan Elizabeth Phillips on Amazon
