Ice Dancing
Genre: Kindle Edition
Brand: Wordarts
Author: Catherine Czerkawska
Price: £0.00
Ice Dancing is a very grown up love story with a Scottish village setting, beautifully evoked by a best selling novelist with a strong sense of place.
It's a novel about the lightning strike of love at first sight, a story of past suffering and the possibility of healing.
Helen - who narrates the novel - has almost resigned herself to the downward slide into mildly discontented middle age. She's approaching forty, living in a rural backwater, with her only child about to fly the nest. But when she meets and falls in love with Joe, a Canadian ice hockey player spending a season with a local team, she realises that nothing will ever be the same for either of them again. Joe is nine years younger and a hero to die for, attractive, polite and articulate. But like so many of Czerkawska's novels, which often deal with friendship and betrayal as well as love, this is a story with a dark side. Although Joe skates like an angel, he has his own demons to cope with, a sadder, more complicated and infinitely more shocking past than Helen could ever imagine.
Hilary Ely, reviewing this novel for Vulpes Libris, writes, 'The narrative brilliantly describes the physical imperative they have to be together – not just the snatched times alone, but the magnetic pull they have towards one another when other people are around, their almost uncontrollable urge to touch one another and the risks that brings.'
'Everyone, it seems, carries a skeleton in their closet, a secret which they hold from their nearest and dearest. Joe is no exception and one unforeseen consequence of his affair with Helen is that his past is revealed in all its horror. But Czerkawska doesn’t overdo this, it comes out piecemeal and then with a tsunami, and then life goes on – but changed. Just like in reality. You take the hit and you carry on. Damaged, changed but you carry on. Because that’s what people do.'
Cally Phillips, The Indie eBook Review
Catherine Czerkawska is an established novelist and award winning playwright, living and working in Scotland. As well as producing a significant body of fiction, long and short, traditionally and independently published, she has written more than 100 plays for BBC radio, television and theatre.
It's a novel about the lightning strike of love at first sight, a story of past suffering and the possibility of healing.
Helen - who narrates the novel - has almost resigned herself to the downward slide into mildly discontented middle age. She's approaching forty, living in a rural backwater, with her only child about to fly the nest. But when she meets and falls in love with Joe, a Canadian ice hockey player spending a season with a local team, she realises that nothing will ever be the same for either of them again. Joe is nine years younger and a hero to die for, attractive, polite and articulate. But like so many of Czerkawska's novels, which often deal with friendship and betrayal as well as love, this is a story with a dark side. Although Joe skates like an angel, he has his own demons to cope with, a sadder, more complicated and infinitely more shocking past than Helen could ever imagine.
Hilary Ely, reviewing this novel for Vulpes Libris, writes, 'The narrative brilliantly describes the physical imperative they have to be together – not just the snatched times alone, but the magnetic pull they have towards one another when other people are around, their almost uncontrollable urge to touch one another and the risks that brings.'
'Everyone, it seems, carries a skeleton in their closet, a secret which they hold from their nearest and dearest. Joe is no exception and one unforeseen consequence of his affair with Helen is that his past is revealed in all its horror. But Czerkawska doesn’t overdo this, it comes out piecemeal and then with a tsunami, and then life goes on – but changed. Just like in reality. You take the hit and you carry on. Damaged, changed but you carry on. Because that’s what people do.'
Cally Phillips, The Indie eBook Review
Catherine Czerkawska is an established novelist and award winning playwright, living and working in Scotland. As well as producing a significant body of fiction, long and short, traditionally and independently published, she has written more than 100 plays for BBC radio, television and theatre.