The Dancers Dancing - Softcover

Dhuibhne, Eilis Ni

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0856408069 ISBN 13: 9780856408069

Publisher: Blackstaff Pr, 2007

Synopsis

The girls are spending a month in a Donegal Gaeltacht, learning Irish language and culture from their teachers and from the local people they are boarding with. They respond to the untamed landscape of river, hill and sea, finding in it unnerving echoes of their own submerged - and now emerging - wildnesses. In this richly complex novel, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, one of Ireland's most exciting and original writers, uses the experiences and emotions of girls on the cusp of womanhood to explore dangerous territories of sex, politics, class, and Irishness.

About this title

About the Author:

EILIS NI DHUIBHNE was born in Dublin. Her works include Blood and Water, The Bray House, Eating Women is Not Recommended, The Inland Ice and The Pale Gold of Alaska. She has won the Bisto Book of the Year Award, the Readers' Association of Ireland Award, the Stewart Parker Award and an Oireachtas. The Dancers Dancing was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000. Her most recent book, W.B. Yeats:Works and Days, was voted the Irish Publishers' Book of the Year, 2007. She works as a librarian in the National Library of Ireland.

From Publishers Weekly:

Irish writer Dhuibhne (The Inland Ice; Blood and Water) offers an unruffled, pedestrian view of the lives of pubescent Irish girls in 1972, as a group of teenyboppers embark on their first long trip away from their Dublin and Derry homes. The girls take a bus to Donegal, to attend the summer session at an Irish language and culture school called a Gaeltacht. Two of them, fat misfit Orla and effortlessly perfect Aisling, assume center stage in the mild drama, although Dhuibhne sketches a large cast of supporting characters, including other students and the families the girls board with in Donegal. The story unfolds through quietly revealing dialogue rather than any clear direction in the plot. The young people attend classes and dances, acclimate themselves to their new surroundings, scuffle with familial and social loyalties and endure each other's minor betrayals and teen epiphanies. Orla actively avoids visiting an elderly aunt until the very end of her stay, but when she finally meets her relative, her predictable surprise at the old woman's warmth and endearing eccentricity is tepidly rendered, dissipating the energy for what could have been a poignant, illuminating scene. The girls take every opportunity to swim in a local river, and tragedy is foreshadowed, but when it comes it involves people outside the Gaeltacht, has no impact on the main characters and is dismissed in a page. The pace is sluggish, and the characters, introduced in initially engaging portraits, develop no further as the book progresses. Such obstructions to narrative flow and realized characters blunt the power of Dhuibhne's occasionally lovely prose. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Blackstaff Pr
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0856408069
• ISBN 13: 9780856408069
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 296