Dance Hall Road

by Marion Douglas

Mid-August and two boys lie on the abandoned ski jump in Minnow Lake. Water laps onto the old plywood ramp. There is talk of mud, goosebumps, and frogs. The humid air transports the muted thump of a basketball from the local dance hall atop the escarpment. The quiet is punctured with the staggered pop of gun practice in nearby woods. At 15, Adrian knows this day as the last day that life was normal. Set in 1970, Dance Hall Road examines adolescence and adulthood, friendship and family within the ricochet of events through small-town life. When the death of another high school student pushes the Town into collective despair, harsh gossip and casually dropped pellets of blame take seed. Currents of anger and frustration are, in turn, meted out in the scapegoating of those who are decidedly different. Told through two narratives in parallel time, we simultaneously follow the chronology of rural life, death, and sexuality alongside Adrian's present distress and reckoning of consequences. With a keen sense of the human experience, Marion Douglas portrays her characters with unflinching empathy. Evocative and multi-layered, Dance Hall Road invokes the contradictions of connection within the tenuous balance of regret and hope. Praise for Dance Hall Road "Marion Douglas is the queen of small-town strangeness, and Dance Hall Road is a gripping, moving, darkly hilarious web of lives." — Emma Donoghue, author of Slammerkin

Genres: Fiction, Queer, Canada

480 pages, paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[CaseyTheCanadianLesbrarian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can’t lie: reading Marion Douglas’s novel Dance Hall Road was a struggle. I guess I might as well admit upfront that I skimmed and selectively read my way through the last hundred pages or so. I did faithfully read the first 380 pages, though, which is pretty good perseverance, I think. The book was slow-going from the beginning, and never really did a good job of holding my attention. If I hadn’t had the intention of reviewing it, I’d have abandoned it about 100 pages in. That said, I did feel like the novel had potential, and I did get a bit excited for a while in the middle when I was hopeful about a pending lesbian romance. Unfortunately, the book managed to squash my hopes; what’s more, the style eventually began to annoy me. Let me explain:

Dance Hall Road is a novel set in rural Ontario in the seventies. It’s kind of Victorian in scope and conception, something that I am totally up for (I read and loved George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a novel that is too much for a lot of people). However, in the end I felt that Douglas’s novel could probably have been cut in half. It really could have done with some fastidious editing. I get that Douglas is setting the scene and introducing a vast array of characters, but it’s not a good sign if you feel like the novel hasn’t really gotten started yet and you’re over a hundred pages in....

See the rest of my review at my blog: http://caseythecanadianlesbrarian.wor...

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book on a whim from the fresh selections at the library in my hometown. I was pleasantly surprised by what I read. Douglas' depictions of teenage life in rural Ontario tread the border between touching and disturbing. The author manages to craft life-altering events within the slow, lazy haze that accompanies life in a small town. Dance Hall Road is worth reading and makes an excellent addition to a summer book list.