The Dancing Master

The Dancing Master

Julie Klassen

 Alec Valcourt has left London in disgrace. His mother and sister join him as he moves in with his uncle in a small town. Alec is a dancing master, but soon learns that dancing is not allowed by the patron of the town. He's left with very few choices for employment. He quickly makes friends, but when he befriends the daughter of the town patron things began to get complicated.

I was really looking forward to reading this book. The cover was perfect, the description sounded interesting, and I've read and enjoyed books by this author before.

But it was not meant to be. It took me forever to get into the book. It just seemed to plod along with nothing happening. I couldn't relate to the two main characters and the story lacked any real plot at first. The writing was good, but the characters and lack of plot were what made this just an okay book. If the two main characters were gone and several of the secondary characters had more of a place I would have really enjoyed the book since I like reading about this time period. Another small annoyance (that I probably wouldn't have even noticed had I been enjoying the book) were the awkward placement of the quotes about dancing masters at the beginning of each chapter. Instead of giving some insight into what was coming in the next chapter, they seemed to focus on the chapter I had just finished. For some reason this just really detracted from the story for me. In summary, it wasn't a bad book, it just wasn't what I was expecting from this author.

I received this book free of charge from Bethany House in exchange for my honest review.