Showing results for "Dancing" in Coming of Age

In a coming-of-age story, young Mattie and Kip tap dance and ride the rails during the Great Depression. Separated by a perceived betrayal and a train crash, the two friends lose each other for a lifetime. At ninety-nine, Mattie recalls the roving youth who set her life in motion and confides her deepest regrets to her granddaughter, who discovers lessons in the past for present challenges.

It is the late 1970s and teenagers Gaia and her brother Bron live with their parents on their isolated property on Western Australia's Coral Coast. Intensively trained for a career as a professional ballet dancer by her mother, once a principal dancer in the American Ballet Theatre, Gaia also loves snorkeling over the coral reef that borders their small market garden. Then comes a day that changes her life forever: she discovers a rare pair of dramatically colored seadragons, their courtship dance over the coral spellbinding, and that night she loses her entire family and her dancing dream.

Dancing at the Rascal Fair by National Book Award nominee Ivan Doig captures the passion and tenacity of turn-of-the-century immigrants struggling to build new lives amidst Montana’s windswept Rockies. The tale unfolds into a contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill—kept apart by obligations—as they and their stormy kin vie to tame the brutal land.