Dance Hall Road By Marion Douglas
Dance Hall Road 
In small towns, people talk. And when they run out of real information about each other to exchange, they make things up.
Sometimes, things happen that are so shocking nobody has to make anything up: it’s all out there, just waiting for the rumours, the false conclusions, the misplaced indignation, and just sometimes, tenderness, forgiveness, and understanding.
Marion Douglas has created a complex portrait of small town life in her multi-layered novel, Dance Hall Road. Moving back and forth in time, the story is told from various points of view in turn: Adrian Drury, the dentist’s son, whose lapse in chivalry sets off a chain of events that culminates in violence and death; Cheryl Decker, Adrian’s girlfriend, whose brother died racing a train and who now must cope with her parents’ overwhelming grief; Maddy Farrell, basketball star and permanent outsider, who may have found redemption in the arms of Rose Drury; and Rose herself, the town “good girl,” trying not to be so good after all.
There are no gimmicks in Marion Douglas’s writing. She understands human emotions and the footprints our actions leave in the lives of others. Dance Hall Road is a touching, disturbing, funny, and sad, sometimes all at once.
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