Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, European Peoples & Cultures - Fiction & Literature

Dancing in a Distant Place

Name: Dancing in a Distant Place
Author: Isla Dewar
ISBN: 9780312349462

by Isla Dewar

Write a review

Overview

A warm and intelligent novel about a young teacher who throws herself into the lives of her students in the hopes of forgetting the past, only to find it returning more vividly than ever.When Iris Chisholm arrives in the tiny Scottish Highland community of Green Cairns, she's still in a state of shock--not so much from her husband's untimely death as from the discovery that he'd gambled away all their money and even their home. In addressing the problems of the children at the school where she works, Iris finds distractions from worries. Further distractions come in the shape of a honey-tongued lawyer and a gentle handyman. This is a novel with wit and heart from an author who is quickly rising in the ranks of international women's fiction authors.

About the Author, Isla Dewar

Isla Dewar was born in Edinburgh. Her novels have been warmly acclaimed in the United Kingdom. She lives in Fife with her husband, a cartoonist; they have two sons.

Reviews

There are no reviews yet. Log in to write one.

Editorials

From the Publisher

Praise for DANCING IN A DISTANT PLACE:
"Dewar's funny, tragic, warm-hearted, life-affirming story is guaranteed to hold readers spellbound. Superb women's fiction." -- Booklist (Starred Review)

"Dewar is an accessible storyteller with a wry sense of the comic...the episodic story is satisfying...comfortable and sweet." -- Kirkus Reviews "Fans of Maeve Binchy may enjoy Dewar's perceptive omniscient guidance through the cozy Scottish world of these likeable, flawed characters." --Publishers Weekly "A fabulous family drama." -- The Midwest Book Review "Move over Maeve Binchy: there's a new writer on the block...Dewar's prose is crisp, her humor contagious...Readers will thoroughly enjoy this romp in the Scottish highlands." -- The Roanoke Times
Praise for Isla Dewar's Novels:
"Dewar has a great knack of taking ordinary people and situations and flipping them on their heads, and her characters are engagingly eccentric and complex." -Glamour (UK)
"Observant and needle-sharp -- very funny." -The Times
"Explosively funny and chokingly poignant." -Scotland on Sunday
"Breathless...appealing spirited...sparkiness, freshness and verve." -Mail on Sunday

Kirkus Reviews

A recently widowed teacher comes to enliven the children of a rural Scottish community. Popular in the UK, Dewar is an accessible storyteller with a wry sense of the comic. She possesses affection for her characters and has some of the rooted, unpretentious charm of Maeve Binchy. Her domestic drama is set mainly in a remote and lonely Highland glen where a "lop-sided and shy" bunch of children, whose previous schoolmistress was sacked for hitting them, is brought to life by the creative, irreverent teaching style of Iris Chisholm. Iris has relocated to Green Cairns, with her two teenaged children, Scott and Sophy, after the death of her husband, Harry, in a car crash, which precipitated the revelation that he had been deceiving her for years, systematically gambling away all their money, leaving her heavily in debt and more heavily humiliated. The tiny village community she joins is gossipy and conservative, despite its two eligible men and some incoming hippies and homesteaders. Iris's unconventional style sets tongues wagging. She focuses so hard on her pupils, especially a silent boy named Colin, that she leaves herself open to accusations of neglecting her own two, who smoke, drink, sulk and play truant. Part village saga, part redemption fable, this episodic story is satisfying, if somewhat monotonously structured and perfunctorily concluded. Comfortable and sweet: Despite the story's one real tragedy, a fairytale sense of happy outcomes hangs over the tale, rendering everyone benign and no event, not even death, too traumatic.