This year, I am taking part in the SFINCS3 contest as a judge on the TBR team. Round 1 has just begun, and our team will choose 5 novellas from our batch of 20 to go through to the semifinals by 20th December. Every book will be read and scored out of 10 by at least two people. At this stage, we are not obliged to review, but I will try and review as many as I can on here. My reviews are my own opinions and do not necessarily reflect those of my team.
Dance With Me features a tiny, beautiful ceramic ballerina enchanted to life by an elven boy. She lives in a room full of enchanted figurines, some fragile porcelain, others sturdier wood, stored inside cabinets owned by an elven family. The boy chooses the porcelain ballerina to dance for him occasionally, naming her Lyra. She glories in those times, loving her beautiful hair and face and her pristine outfit. She longs for the boy to visit her, and on the days he does not, she finds her spirits sinking and her anxiety increasing as she blames herself for not dancing well enough to keep his interest. She encounters other figurines in her cabinet who are horribly disfigured, having been dropped many years ago, which causes her anxiety to become even worse and develop into terror when contemplating the horrors that might afflict her. They try to give her advice, but she is not yet experienced enough to understand what she needs.
“You cannot survive life intact. That belief is the worst deception anyone can suffer…
Life will chip you, little one. Crack or blind you. Fracture you, and leave its mark. It affects us all, except some do not want to accept it.”
When the boy clutches her roughly, uncaring how delicate she is, her terror becomes real as she suffers injuries at his hand. She is in denial for a while, unable to accept no longer being perfect. Lyra’s raison d’être is to dance and be beautiful. If broken, she considers herself no longer beautiful, and if not chosen to dance, she can see no point to her existence. Her loneliness leads to longing, her mental and physical abuse leads to bewilderment, horror, terror and depression.
Livia J. Elliot’s writing is beautifully moving, pulling on the readers’ heartstrings as the ballerina begins to spiral into anxiety. She cleverly uses strike-through text to show the ballerina’s innermost thoughts and fears – ones she will not even admit to herself.
“It is late, and the night’s silence slips past, threatening to send me into the darkest sleep where my well-deserved misery lives.”
With time, Lyra realises she is a slave to the capricious nature of the boy. It takes a long time before she is able to accept her reality and finally feel some hope for the future. Like many people in abusive relationships, she is unable to save herself, but needs the help of an outside actor. Luckily, the elven boy’s mother enchants the cabinet latch so that only she can open it – but this help has been a long time coming.
“How much is enough pain? Or enough misery? That is the actual question I cannot voice. Doing so would reveal something I’m not ready to accept—and I need my façade… or what remains of it.”
I really enjoyed this heartbreaking little story. It is a fascinating study of emotion, told from the heart.
I’m glad you liked this one. I thought this story was brilliant and inventive. An unexpected highlight for me this year.
Yeah I noticed a few people had already reviewed it on here.