REVIEW: Dancer's Luck
Aug. 11th, 2023 07:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllDancer’s Luck: Lorna Hill, Award Publications, 2003
‘Why am I reading about these people?’ I wondered as I started this book. “These people” are Jaimie Gordon, the impoverished young laird of Airdrochnish on Skye, the rich Americans he is renting out his castle to, the Slaughters, and their guest Sheena MacDonald. I had forgotten that we’d encountered Sheena in ‘Dancer’s Peel’ and only realised this when she bumps into Annette Dancy, who I did remember. The story then follows Annette, relating how the young dancer ended up in Skye and then going on to tell us what she does there and the adventurous way she leaves it.
Although the book does convey Skye, the ‘real Skye’ that only some visitors get to see, most of its characters are stereotypes. Jaimie, although he’s older than him, is a friend of Angus MacCrimmon’s, and both of them are rather romantically drawn silent Highlander types. The Americans who live in Aridrochnish castle are drawn as childlike, kind-hearted but with no taste as they spend their wealth on clashing tartans and their comforts. Annette’s Cosmopolitan Ballet school/junior company is peopled by clichés too from the dancing master to her greatest rival in dance.
I wasn’t swept up by the romances in the book. Sheena has her eye on Jaimie, and he has his eye on her, for she is very beautiful, just all too aware of it and dreaming of getting in the fashion/gossip magazines. (Good job she’s too early for Instagram!) When she all but dares him to climb a dangerous pinnacle to get her two eagle feathers and then she’ll condescend to dance with him at the Gathering, he gets her the feathers, but refuses to dance with her, putting her queenly little nose right out of it. Quite right too. But nonetheless, because she is soooo very beautiful, we are assured that he’s decided he’ll marry her (granted, both share a love of mountaineering and are from the same island, but couldn’t he have fallen for a nicer girl? There’s a suggestion he’ll curb her worst traits, but still. And is that a healthy dynamic?)
Sheena and Annette rub each other the wrong way - Sheena is outright jealous of the charm Annette has for young men, of which Annette is only partly aware. While Annette is completely immodest about her dancing, it’s part of her monomania, and less irritating than Sheena’s vanity (perhaps because this is in a book) so we side with the younger girl.
But I disagreed with the authorial criticism of Annette, who is young for her age of fifteen and has managed to miss all the signs about Angus’s feelings for her, so when Angus steals a kiss, she freezes and then slaps him. Hill writes ‘she didn’t behave either very kindly, or with much imagination.’ Bah! While I don’t condone the slapping, if Annette didn’t expect the kiss – and he could have asked or given her some warning - why should a seventeen-year-old boy’s feelings completely override a fifteen-year-old girl’s? Hill rather confers seigneurial rights on her heroes, although I was all for it when Jaimie coolly suggests Annette take a bike Sheena wanted to start her voyage back to London and an audition. He wants to spoil Sheena from potentially getting a job that would take her to Canada for his own purposes, although he might well suspect what the reader knows, namely that Sheena behaved underhandedly in the hope of spiting Annette, which is why we feel that Sheena deserves her comeuppance, but I disagree with Jaimie blocking Sheena’s future career prospects to suit himself.
Annette’s first love is still dancing, but after the kissing episode, it is suggested that the friend she has rather taken for granted may come to mean more to her.
Also in the book we get to catch up with Max, Annette’s brother, and her beloved Peel – the book is set about a year after ‘Dancing Peel’. The descriptions of her dancing are rather cursory, and the way she gets from Glasgow to London makes the most of that dancer’s luck that gives the book its title, but is not as fortuitous as how Jaimie will make his fortune. I would have loved this book when I was younger than Annette, but, as it is, I don’t think it’s as good as ‘Dancing Peel’ was other than in how vividly Skye is drawn.
‘Why am I reading about these people?’ I wondered as I started this book. “These people” are Jaimie Gordon, the impoverished young laird of Airdrochnish on Skye, the rich Americans he is renting out his castle to, the Slaughters, and their guest Sheena MacDonald. I had forgotten that we’d encountered Sheena in ‘Dancer’s Peel’ and only realised this when she bumps into Annette Dancy, who I did remember. The story then follows Annette, relating how the young dancer ended up in Skye and then going on to tell us what she does there and the adventurous way she leaves it.
Although the book does convey Skye, the ‘real Skye’ that only some visitors get to see, most of its characters are stereotypes. Jaimie, although he’s older than him, is a friend of Angus MacCrimmon’s, and both of them are rather romantically drawn silent Highlander types. The Americans who live in Aridrochnish castle are drawn as childlike, kind-hearted but with no taste as they spend their wealth on clashing tartans and their comforts. Annette’s Cosmopolitan Ballet school/junior company is peopled by clichés too from the dancing master to her greatest rival in dance.
I wasn’t swept up by the romances in the book. Sheena has her eye on Jaimie, and he has his eye on her, for she is very beautiful, just all too aware of it and dreaming of getting in the fashion/gossip magazines. (Good job she’s too early for Instagram!) When she all but dares him to climb a dangerous pinnacle to get her two eagle feathers and then she’ll condescend to dance with him at the Gathering, he gets her the feathers, but refuses to dance with her, putting her queenly little nose right out of it. Quite right too. But nonetheless, because she is soooo very beautiful, we are assured that he’s decided he’ll marry her (granted, both share a love of mountaineering and are from the same island, but couldn’t he have fallen for a nicer girl? There’s a suggestion he’ll curb her worst traits, but still. And is that a healthy dynamic?)
Sheena and Annette rub each other the wrong way - Sheena is outright jealous of the charm Annette has for young men, of which Annette is only partly aware. While Annette is completely immodest about her dancing, it’s part of her monomania, and less irritating than Sheena’s vanity (perhaps because this is in a book) so we side with the younger girl.
But I disagreed with the authorial criticism of Annette, who is young for her age of fifteen and has managed to miss all the signs about Angus’s feelings for her, so when Angus steals a kiss, she freezes and then slaps him. Hill writes ‘she didn’t behave either very kindly, or with much imagination.’ Bah! While I don’t condone the slapping, if Annette didn’t expect the kiss – and he could have asked or given her some warning - why should a seventeen-year-old boy’s feelings completely override a fifteen-year-old girl’s? Hill rather confers seigneurial rights on her heroes, although I was all for it when Jaimie coolly suggests Annette take a bike Sheena wanted to start her voyage back to London and an audition. He wants to spoil Sheena from potentially getting a job that would take her to Canada for his own purposes, although he might well suspect what the reader knows, namely that Sheena behaved underhandedly in the hope of spiting Annette, which is why we feel that Sheena deserves her comeuppance, but I disagree with Jaimie blocking Sheena’s future career prospects to suit himself.
Annette’s first love is still dancing, but after the kissing episode, it is suggested that the friend she has rather taken for granted may come to mean more to her.
Also in the book we get to catch up with Max, Annette’s brother, and her beloved Peel – the book is set about a year after ‘Dancing Peel’. The descriptions of her dancing are rather cursory, and the way she gets from Glasgow to London makes the most of that dancer’s luck that gives the book its title, but is not as fortuitous as how Jaimie will make his fortune. I would have loved this book when I was younger than Annette, but, as it is, I don’t think it’s as good as ‘Dancing Peel’ was other than in how vividly Skye is drawn.
