A Dancer’s Guide to Africa

In A Dancer’s Guide to Africa by Terez Mertes Rose, ballet dancer turned Peace Corps volunteer Fiona Garvey travels to the country of Gabon in Central Africa. It’s 1988, and she is escaping her overachieving siblings and small town life in Iowa. Her two year service in Gabon changes her deeply on a personal and spiritual level. This is Africa, which she is starkly reminded of it at every turn, and what she has always known and done is of no help to her here. Veils between worlds are thinner, mindsets are different, and there is a power around her that she does not yet understand until she is finally able to connect to Gabon at a deeper, even frightening, level through dance.

This book is no thriller, but the storytelling keeps the reader ticking through at a steady pace, wondering all the time what will happen next. It’s very much character-driven, and that keeps you reading. While it is predictable to some degree, it’s an enjoyable, even cathartic, reading experience with the feminine energy that takes over on the page.