Saturday Review: “Bringing the Hidden into the Light” a review by Moira Crone in NCLR Online Winter 2025 of Elaine Neil Orr’s novel Dancing Woman (2025)
“The beautifully rendered setting and incidents bear comparison to classic works about women of European descent struggling for a new sense of significance and self in a foreign culture,” Crone writes. “A riveting book about art in life, Dancing Woman invites its readers to bring the hidden into the light, discover its true nature, and allow it to shine.”
Orr writes for Isabel what almost every bride, new mother, and creative woman wants. Crone explains that “[Isabel] has two quests – one, for a harmonious, normal, family life in a foreign country, with a husband she loves, and another, “for a larger expression of her inner world, to join . . . with a sweeping unifying force
. . . between the visible, the felt, and the imagined” (49).
Ask almost any new mother about how they are making time for themselves amidst learning to parent and they will laugh at your question, then probably cry. We have to relearn who we are as women after a monumental change like becoming a parent or moving to a different continent, as Isabel, the main character in Orr’s new novel, does. Crone lovingly remarks, “As a painter myself, I found the rendering of the pleasure,
agony, and serendipity of the practice on point. The sense of embarrassment and the fear of losing track of time and place, and a family’s needs, when in the soar of creativity, will be familiar to young mothers everywhere who pursue any private art.”
Read the entire review here before the NCLR Online Winter 2025 issue arrives! To Order from the publisher, Dancing Woman.
