Looking For the Possible Dance- A.L. Kennedy

[Tracy]

4.5 stars
Margaret is grieving- the loss of her father, who was her hero. The loss of her job- even though she was not suited for it and her boss was horrible. And the possibility of losing her relationship with her true love, Colin.
This story starts almost at the end-Margaret is on a train to London, thinking and remembering. While on the train she meets James, an otherly abled boy with an uncanny ability to see through her, and they become friends. While their encounter is brief, he affects her.
The spoilers in this book aren’t the beginning and end, but the events in the middle. For 250 pages, it packs a lot in: father-daughter relationships, the difficulty of maturing and falling in love, and the working world, especially self-serving bosses. It touches on feminism, activism, racism, and sexism, as well as assumptions made about those who have physical or mental disabilities. It shows what can happen in the real world when we stand up for what’s right.

And Kennedy does all of this with such a deft hand, the reader doesn’t catch it until a few pages later, when everything meshes. I can’t believe this was her first novel.
There is some swearing, and at times it can be hard to catch the transitions. All in all, a very good, and surprising gem. It deserves its place on the list.

[Diane]

Rating: 3 stars

A bleak book about relationships and loss. Unfortunately, I didn't love this as much as Tracy did. It was just okay for me. Lots of dialogue and not much on plot. The ending was a bit much, but I won't give details. I did enjoy the Scottish dialect, though.

[Gail]

Looking for the Possible Dance is choreographed in such a way that I was never sure if I was looking back or looking forward. However, I found our Main Character's struggles with her relationships throughout the book very well done regardless of where I was in the chronology.
We learn of Maggie's incredibly strong relationship with her father which is laced with both wonders and guilt. As an only child to a single parent, Maggie invests a great deal of herself in keeping her father happy and even after his passing, she carries a lingering guilt for having grown up, for having left him even though it was actually he, by dying, who left her. She has a horrible relationship with a sexist and manipulative boss and although she seems quite capable of getting another job, we are lead to believe that she is lucky to have the job she has. She has a maturing relationship with her boyfriend Colin, who has displaced her father to a certain extent in her affections, but who left her once and returned and who she has a great deal of trouble trusting. She trusts herself with love even less. She distrusts love.
One of the delights of the book is a relationship she discovers with a stranger on a train. Her travel companion James is disabled and his mother and aunt have grown weary of caring for him and do not even seem to recognize him as a full human being.
The writing is quirky and extremely descriptive of emotional states with no flowery edges. For example - she uses the phrase; "beyond his dignity" rather than below his dignity or beyond his reach...the writing is permeated with his kind of juxtaposition and the harsh Scots accent plays to this well also.
There is a moment of extreme violence in the book which may or may not have needed to be as violent as it was....the act itself was less important than the edgy tension that was kept in the background throughout most of the book as I realized that something bad was going to happen.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and gave it 4 stars.