A gentle, and very pleasant novel involving various people who help each other, mostly in Cornwall. An injured dancer, two men with very different secrets, and various others, some of whom appeared in earlier books by the same author. It's not necessary to have read her earlier books, but it adds to the enjoyment to 'meet' old friends and find out how they're getting on.

The first time I read this I thought it a little slow to get started, with rather too many characters. But on re-reading over a decade later, I absolutely loved it. Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys women's fiction.

Longer review here: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2020/10/echoes-of-dance-by-marcia-willett.h... ( )

This is a rather turgid and peculiar blend of the worst kind of American cod-psychology and a Mills & Boon novel. It’s very overwritten and contains long scenes where characters think through their emotions and situations in great and laborious detail, either by themselves or with other people. It was all very exhausting and at times unintentionally amusing.

That’s not to say the basic premise isn’t interesting, as it is. Daisy is forced to reconsider her dancing career due to injury, Kate is coming to terms with the death of her husband, and Roly has to move on from an unrequited romance. A great deal of tension could have resulted from this set of circumstances but unfortunately the sheer amount of emoting dissolved any sliver of tension away that there might once have been. It’s a case of a misguided attempt at poetic prose killing all the plot stone dead.

The characters are themselves rather clichéd as well and so, no matter how much they discuss their various tragedies with each other, I never really cared about any of it. I did have some sympathy with Monica who’s cast as the evil mother of the piece, as she found everyone else in the book just as irritating as I did – but even she is really too much of a caricature to come to life on the page.

Towards the end, I got very bored and began skipping the purple prose to see if anything important happened. It doesn’t, and to cap it all the whole sudden issue of the sexuality of one of the characters in the final chapters is both badly planned and utterly ridiculous. It made me laugh and for all the wrong reasons.

Verdict: 2 stars. Badly-written and unrealistic ( )

This is the third book I have read in this series and it is wonderful to join the same characters a little later in their lives. I love the way Marcia Willett writes---I could recognize any of her characters if I saw them walking down the street. She tells a story with several parts to it, pulling all the pieces together with their interrelationships. I cared very much about what happened to the same people I had come to know so well in the first two books, enough so that I actually exclaimed out loud with some of the events that came to pass. A wonderful escape experience. ( )