Comment

Apr 13, 2019rogebc_0 rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
This is one of the best books I've ever read. The audio version was excellent, with the reader an actor who read with accented voices that evoked the characters. The story starts with the end in 2008 - the narrator, never named, has lost her all-consuming job being the assistant to a powerful and famous performer. But it starts in 1982 in a low income housing "estate" in London at a dance class in a classical but run down church, St. Christopher's. It starts with two mothers bringing their very young daughters to the dance class. Two mothers with "brown girls" who see each other and connect without words or actions. Tracy is the one with talent and drive and ideas and yellow stain ribbons and a doting mother. Our narrator is the one who loves dancing and musicals and who has flat feet and is dressed sensibly by her Afro-Carribean feminist mother who aspires to her high ideals. The moments are vivid and many. Life moves between the recent past and the childhood past. The links connect the two but there is no preaching, no plot tricks or artifice. It is life moving through time, people doing and not doing things in ways they should and should not do. Outcomes that are deserved and undeserved, fair and unfair, just and unjust. In the end there is Tracy, her life a ruin but the last image is of her on the estate balcony, dancing with her children.