Danceland Diary
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dee Hobsbawn-Smith
Radiant Press, 2022
232 pages
ISBN: 9781989274828
$22.00
Reviewed by Zeel Desai
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dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s Danceland Diary is a mysterious novel that, at its heart, is a disturbing account of family history going back three generations.
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Luka Dekker’s search for her missing mother leads her and her son to the family farm. Her grandmother, Anky (Charlotte), greets her in the kitchen with barely an acknowledgment, and she does not hug her great-grandson.
Anky tells her great-grandson about their life as Hutterites, but his mother has been oblivious until now, which only amplifies Luka’s need to know more. In her hometown, Luka sees many people from her past she wants to forget. Earl, now happily married, was her childhood crush.
Luka’s quest to find her mother, Lark, who left her and her sister Connie at their grandma’s house when they were eight, is met with tight lips from the townspeople. Still, she is determined to investigate her background and discover why her mother abandoned her and then vanished while she was living in Vancouver. Luka shares flashbacks from her life in Vancouver, but only really makes progress when she hires detective Andrew Rockmore.
“Over the years in Vancouver, her absence subsided to a dull ache. Now, back on the prairie where her presence is so vivid, the loss of her feels like a tidal wave,” Luka says.
When Anky dies, she leaves Luka and Connie the farm, some money, and her diary. To find answers, Luka reads the harsh truths of Anky’s life, including when she was raped at Danceland and fell pregnant with Luka’s mother. The diary gives us a clearer picture of Anky’s life and a glimpse of Lark’s childhood and battle with bipolar disorder. As she reads on, Luka questions her own sanity as well as her son’s future.
Hobsbawn-Smith tells Luka’s story of progress, regret, growth, and acceptance in a disarmingly poetic voice: “I feel the wings of my community settle in around me as I burrow a nest into the couch and resume reading.” As Luka tries to break the chains of generational trauma, she is bittersweet, still wrestling with her haunting past.
As a Hutterite, Hobsbawn-Smith infuses each sentence with her love for her culture, food, clothing, and gardens. She offers hope that broken relationships will heal, and emotional pain will subside with time and understanding. Readers may begin the book convinced of the cast’s otherness, but gradually they see this world through the eyes of a marginalized and neurodivergent person with desires not so different than their own.
Hobsbawn-Smith’s award-winning poetry, essays, and short fiction have been published across countries including Canada, the US, and Scotland. She earned her MFA in Writing and her MA in English Lit at the University of Saskatchewan. Her debut poetry collection, Wildness Rushing In, was a finalist for Book of the Year and Best Poetry Collection at the Saskatchewan Book Awards. 2015. She served as the 35th Writer-in-Residence at Saskatoon Public Library in 2015 and published What Can’t Be Undone that same year. Published in 2021, Bread & Water won the Saskatchewan non-fiction book prize. This spring, Hobsbawn-Smith released her new poetry collection, Among the Untamed.
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