The Phoenix Ballroom by Ruth Hogan
When it’s time to face the music, all we can do is dance…
Recently widowed Venetia Hamilton Hargreaves is left with a huge house, a bank balance to match and an uneasy feeling that she’s been sleepwalking through the last fifty years. Determined to live fully again, she embraces life with an enthusiasm and purpose she’d forgotten she could muster.
Buying the dilapidated Phoenix Ballroom and with it a drop-in centre and spiritualist church could be seen as reckless, but Venetia’s generosity, courage and kindness provide a refuge for a touching cast of damaged and lonely people who find their chosen family. As their stories intertwine, long buried secrets are revealed, missed opportunities seized and lives are renewed as the Phoenix lives up to its name.
The Phoenix Ballroom is a story of hope and second chances across the generations.
My Review
I’ve read all of Ruth’s novels, a couple of them twice (almost unheard of for me). The Phoenix Ballroom is her fifth and it’s wonderful. But don’t expect something earth shattering that will change the world as we know it. This is a feel-good novel about hope and happiness across the generations. A book to be savoured when you are feeling down, a book to lift your spirits. And of course when you are already happy.
Venetia Hamilton Hargreaves has just lost her husband Hawk after fifty years of marriage. She knows she is going to be lonely, but her son Heron thinks she needs a ‘granny nanny’ to look after her. She is horrified. She’ll manage, she’s not exactly in her dotage.
It’s probably a good time to explain the names. Hawk’s father had a thing about birds, so the children all got avian names. Hawk, of course, and then his sisters are Swan and Nightingale. Hawk passed this down to his son Heron (who’s really more of a Penguin than a Heron), and even Heron’s son got lumbered. He’s ten and he’s called Kite. And they wonder why he finds it tough at boarding school.
Heron wants to hire an awful school ma’am type as the nanny, but Venetia chooses Liberty, who has recently lost her mother and the strange will has left her with nowhere to live. There is an extra clause though. If she passes a ‘test’, there is something that she will inherit, but the solicitor is not allowed to tell her until she fulfils her mother’s wishes. Except she has no idea what they are.
Venetia also adopts a German Shepherd from a drug den and calls him Colin Firth and we mustn’t forget Evangeline, who runs a spiritualist church and drop-in centre which are about to be closed down, and the building demolished for development. And it has a ballroom, now in a state of disrepair. A ballroom that will evoke memories for Venetia.
Poor Liberty! Having been hired to look after Venetia, she now has a dog of whom she is terrified and a ten year old boy who comes to stay. And then there is Swan.
It’s such an entertaining story and works really well as an Audio book. Joan Walker’s narration is perfect and fits so well. I loved every minute.
About the Author
From Ruth herself: ‘I was born in the house where my parents still live in Bedford: my sister was so pleased to have a sibling that she threw a thrupenny bit at me. As a child I read everything I could lay my hands on: The Moomintrolls, A Hundred Million Francs, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the back of cereal packets and gravestones. I was mad about dogs and horses, but didn’t like daddy-long-legs or sugar in my tea.
‘I studied English and Drama at Goldsmiths College which was brilliant, but then I came home and got a ‘proper’ job. I worked for ten years in a senior local government position (I was definitely a square peg in a round hole, but it paid the bills and mortgage) before a car accident left me unable to work full-time and convinced me to start writing seriously. It was going well, but then in 2012 I got cancer, which was bloody inconvenient but precipitated an exciting hair journey from bald to a peroxide blonde Annie Lennox crop. When chemo kept me up all night I passed the time writing and the eventual result was The Keeper of Lost Things.
‘I live in a chaotic Victorian house with an assortment of rescue dogs and my long-suffering partner (who has very recently become my husband – so I can’t be that bad!) I am a magpie, always collecting treasures, and a huge John Betjeman fan. My favourite word is ‘antimacassar’ and I still like reading gravestones.’
