Book review - Moon Dance

Moon Dance

posted in Multiply.com on Sep 17, '05 10:20 PM

Category:	Books
Genre:	Romance
Author:	Mariah Stewart

To while away the time as I stood in the car park waiting for my carpool colleagues, I continued reading Moon Dance, which I thought was suitable only for insufferable romantics. I presumed my sentiments were caused by the nailing biting thriller, Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons I read previously. One woman colleague wondered out loud how come an ‘uncle’ like me is reading a romance novel. I thought, “Huh? What’s wrong with that?”

Although this book started rather uneventfully, I soon became absorbed in its build up of the various characters and the heroine’s decision to leave her lack-luster dancing career under an abusive troupe manager to chart a new course in her life. She ended up staying at a farmhouse owned by a relative and egged on by her passion for dance, innovatively utilized the place for a dance-school. She soon became involved in a whirlwind of events that took her through farming activities, fortune-telling, shipwrecked treasure hunters, a kidnapping, arson and not forgetting a heart-fluttering, head-spinning romance with a young veterinary doctor, who happened to have different plans as to what he wanted to do with the farm-house.

In spite of the simple plot and some long winded less-than-necessary details to tie the storyline together it is still a good read. Perhaps it’s her ability to drop certain hints to arouse the reader’s interest in the rest of the story that stands Mariah Stewart apart from ordinary dime-novel writers.