Official Review: Dance The Moon Down by R.L.Bartram

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[Following is the official OnlineBookClub.org review of "Dance The Moon Down" by R.L.Bartram.]

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Dance the Moon Down is a story about Victoria, the wife of a poet who has to serve in World War I, living in England and trying to make ends meet while waiting for her husband to return from the war. She spends the first half of the book in search for her husband, and the second half of the book working on a farm and befriending a group of uneducated farm-girls, who eventually become her good friends. The suffrage movement going on at the time plays a huge role in Victoria’s life, in the form of her friend Beryl, as well as in Victoria’s observations about how the country treats its women. Victoria, herself, is not taken seriously when she tries to talk to officers to find out the whereabouts of her husband, and the whole tone of the book illustrates the minor slights and injustices that women had to face from men in their everyday lives.

This book is clearly written by a hand that has a good command of the English language, and the author does a decent job of setting the scene around civilians trying to cope with the horrors going on around them and to the people they loved during World War I. The sense of urgency, the despair, the fear—they are all captured very well, and there is an honesty to it that makes you feel as though you have been transported through time and can see the world from the perspective of the people that lived through the turbulence.

The only criticism that I have of the book is that it moved slowly—the pacing became a little tedious for me, and I wasn’t able to get too emotionally invested in the plot, aside from my desire to learn what happens to Victoria’s husband. This is probably my personal taste getting in the way, but I think that the book could have been improved if it described the internal changes going on in Victoria more, rather than by making declarative sort of statements about her decisions and behavior, which took on a slight didactic quality, and prevented the reader from experiencing those conclusions with the heroine as she went through various transformations.

I would recommend this book to people that enjoy reading historical fictions, especially set around the war time, and to anyone interested in the lives of people around the turn of the century. For the reasons stated above, I give this book a rating of 3.5 out of 4.

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