What is it about Ireland that makes writers want to pen novels that are dark, brooding and terribly sad? Ellen Boisvert is a French teacher in Boston who is newly widowed. This, perhaps, is a good thing as her marriage to Fintan Dowd doesn't seem to have been particularly happy. She's starting to move on when a chance meeting with an old acquaintance upturns all of her old assumptions about her husband - mainly that he was an orphan with no family - on their ear. She sets off for her husband's hometown in the west of Ireland to find out the truth & ultimately gets far more than she bargained for.

She meets her husband's mother who is someone anyone would love to dislike even when you understand her sad life. Ellen stays in the little town of Gowna to nurse her mother-in-law to her final end and gradually learns the awful truth of her husband's life. In the end, she tries to make amends for the monstrous wrongs wrought by Fintan's mother, but it remains questionable whether or not she has found closure by the end of the book. ( )

I really enjoyed this book.

Ellen and her husband were married for 15 years when he drowns, and she returns to his small town in County Mayo to meet the mother and family he claimed he never had. Ellen and his mother form a wonderful bond, and Ellen re-discovers herself. ( )

How well can you ever know someone? How well can you especially know someone who intentionally keeps the past a secret, lying and hiding the truth? And what do you do once that person is gone and the truth comes out?

Ellen's Irish husband, Fintan, always maintained that he was an orphan but after his accidental death, Ellen runs into an old acquaintance who knew him back in Ireland and finds out that he lied to her for years. His mother is in fact alive. As Ellen struggles with her feelings about Fintan's unexpected death, their troubled marriage, and his obvious desire to close her out of his past, she decides that she should go to Ireland uncertain of her own reasons for making a pilgrimage that Fintan obviously would not have wanted or approved.

Once in Ireland, she meets Fintan's crotchety mother and discovers that there was quite a lot she never knew about her husband, much of which explains their fraught and unhappy marriage. Jo Dowd, Ellen's mother-in-law, is an unhappy, tough-as-nails farm woman who mostly keeps to herself. In fact, she doesn't even want a home nurse despite the fact that she has terminal cancer. But despite having only just met Ellen, she is willing to have her daughter-in-law move in and care for her.

As Ellen comes to know Jo and the others in the village, and to hear of more of Fintan's buried past, she comes to learn about forgiveness, how to move forward, how the future can hinge on the smallest of actions and past secrets. As she uncovers the bitter past, the hurts, and the betrayals, her finds sometimes makes the narrative bleed with despair, anger, and hopelessness. Told from the perspectives of multiple narrators and using interspersed flashbacks, there are multiple plot threads weaving through the book that at first seem unconnected but which come to create a complete tapestry by the end of the novel. The writing itself is very visceral and the characters' emotions, while spare seeming actually strike deeply but the over all feeling of the novel is one of hurt, wrongs, resentment, and regret. It has a desolate and anguished tone and even the faintly hopeful ending couldn't change that. ( )

Dance Lessons by Áine Greaney is about the dance we play with our husbands, wives, in-laws, and our own parents as we strive to keep things amicable and not reveal too many of our own secrets, especially secrets we’re not comfortable with ourselves. Sometimes, it is about the dance the characters play with themselves, balancing the truth and the lies. Set in Boston, the North Shore, and mostly Gowna, Ireland, Greaney’s prose sways like a graceful dancer telling Ellen Boisvert’s (a young lecturer at Coventry Academy) story. She learns that her Irish husband, Fintan, was not an orphan as he had told her, but has a mother still in Ireland, and there are many other secrets he never revealed to her while alive.

“Ellen has read this about nurses, psychotherapists, doctors. Even the largest or most life-saving job boils down to its component pats, a roster of daily tasks.” (page 132)

Despite Ellen’s desire to leave her husband, she stayed with him for more than a decade and never left him before he died in a tragic sailing accident. Upon learning that she has a mother-in-law, she writes a letter to inform Jo Dowd of her son’s death. After an eerie conversation with the woman and several ghostly dreams, Ellen decides to travel to Ireland. Each step and each movement is part of a larger story, a larger existence. Fintan’s life and decisions had more of an impact on those around him than he realized, from his mother to his one-time girlfriend and his current wife, Ellen. Greaney’s story is not one just of grief, but of moving on, stepping out into the light and claiming one’s life back.

Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/09/dance-lessons-by-aine-greaney.html ( )

This was not the book I would normally choose to read, but a good choice for a review book (NetGalley). Some romamance, but not too much and not the main part of the book. The focus is on lost family.

Ellen is American and maried to the Irish Fintan. And their relationship seems to be at the end when Fintan dies in a boat accident. A few months later Ellen finds out that his mother is still alive, although Fintan always said she was dead. What's the cause of this? In the end Ellen decides to go to Ireland, to Knockduff, to find Jo Dowd, Fintan's mother. What happens there, I leave up to you to be read.

The story is told from different perspectives and even a few times from a perspective of someone not mentioned before, leaving you wondering who she is and what her story adds. It keeps you curious. What has happened in the past? How are all those characters connected?

I found it an enjoyable, believable, realistic story. Somehow light, but also with deep meaning.

http://boekenwijs.blogspot.com/2011/04/dance-lessons.html ( )