Absolutely brilliant short stories! The title story has stayed with me long after reading it. I bought Wendy's other collection Sweet Home after reading this and eagerly look forward to her future books

Mathematics

In the first story, the opening line reads:

"The drawer beside Roberta's bed contained remnants of other people's fun"

It is a wonderful encapsulation of all that is to come, referring to a collection of things that have been left behind in the various short-let rentals our protagonist has cleaned. She works in a hotel that has a policy of holding lost property for 2 months before the staff can claim them, but her other boss goes by the saying 'finders keepers, losers weepers'. Unless it is a weapon, then it should be given to him.

"Mr Dalzell had said that anything she found was hers, automatically."

She gets driven around from place to place by another employee with a van, cleaning up after all kinds of people, who we never see or know who they are - but clearly they are not so much the short holiday crowd, more like overnight partying groups. One day she finds something left behind that creates a significant dilemma. Perhaps it was only a matter of time, but from this moment on the story captivates and builds tension as we wonder what choices she will make. Brilliant.

Mrs Dallesandro

Mrs Dallesandro opens as she leaves the hairdresser, giving a wave and observing her reflection as she leaves. She has been married twenty-three years, knows what to expect from her predictable life, is well maintained and under no illusion regarding her husband's various dalliances with much younger women.

Mrs Dallesandro wouldn't call them affairs or relationships, since that would elevate them to a status they didn't warrant. She has never once felt threatened by them.

She is on a mission to go to a sunbed clinic, an activity that she perceives as a minor transgression, that ultimately will give her something she does not get elsewhere. She recalls an episode in her youth with a shopkeeper's son and we wonder if that had an impact on the way she is now, the choices she subsequently made. 

It is an evocative story of the shallowness of a life half lived, of the things a person might occupy themselves with when life has hollowed them out, the strange lengths one might go, to find a substitute for human connection. It reminded me a little of Forbidden Notebook by Alba des Céspedes, another woman living a half-life, who discovers an interior version of herself at odds with how she acts, when she begins to keep an intimate journal.

Golem

In this story jealousy and resentments between sisters surface alongside familial expectations and judgments. A birthday party creates the scene for family dysfunction to play itself out, imbued with the symbolism and pointedness of the gift, with the observations of what people wear, how trivial objects trigger emotions, how the laid-back and the intense personalities function side by side in the great mix of extended family. How human connection blossoms in surprising ways despite the circumstances.

His Daughter

A story of family loss, of grief, of obsession and activity. Just as the family are sitting down to dinner, Curtis pops outside for a minute. He does not come back. Ever. Posters go up all over town, they keep the mother busy. Time passes and signs appear of life changing, reforming, resisting, resenting, of repeat patterns that overtake the old reality. A provocative profound observation of life and death.

Dance Move

In the titular story, a mother takes a pole dancing lesson and at home tries to push her daughter to enrol in ballet. She watches her daughter and friends have fun dirty dancing with a critical eye and is quick to apportion blame.

We learn of an event from her past relating to her brother, an accident, her parents. The reader takes in the present and the past and will make their own connections between them, forced to use their own imagination to ponder any cause and effect on relationships.

Family Dynamics, Human Connection, Cause and Effect in How Lives are Lived

It's not easy to make any overall assumptions or impressions about the collection, as each story took me to a different place through their characters and circumstance, that pulled me in quickly and left me pondering one thing or other.

Perhaps as I describe above, it is that setting up of a dynamic, a situation and the observation of how people react or respond, the reader being given a little or no insight into a person's past that makes us wonder why people decide to act the way they do.

This wasn’t the kind of thing I would normally go for, but I loved it. It was written with so much compassion and kindness, I felt I knew the characters – flaws and all – like my own family.

My favourite kind of short stories are those about ordinary lives of people who are stuck somehow, reaching for something else but never quite getting anywhere. Each story in Dance Move was a perfectly formed glimpse, a mastery of showing just enough to keep the reader thinking about it after they've finished.

'Mathematics' is a gentle story on the surface, about a woman looking after a lost girl, but with dark undertones. 'Mrs Dallasandro' is presumably like a modern day Dalloway, and I loved this story about rich wife getting her tan and nails did while reminiscing about her youth and a sexual encounter, perfectly self contained but also so much bigger than the sum of its parts. 'Billdingsroman' is about a woman called caro who was in a cult-like group and is learning to live again amid all the confusion and blame and guilt, and after finishing I felt as though I'd read a whole novel, not just a few short pages.

Erskine has such a gift of taking lives that might seem quite small but are so much bigger on the inside, and has such a sharp precise way with words that is still somehow soft and full of heart. This is Erskine's second collection, but she's already established herself completely and rightfully deserves all the praise and respect she's gotten so far.

I was absolutely sucked in by these weird and wonderful stories. The characters are so vividly drawn that the reader wants to follow them into the strange scenarios in which they find themselves… and wherever else they want to take us. This is a masterclass in the form.

4.5 stars.

thank you to netgalley for an arc in exchange for an honest review.

i usually stay away from short story collections, i prefer to spend a long period of time with a set of characters. usually, i don’t feel as connected to short stories, but erskine’s second full collection has changed that. now, i definitely have more of an appreciation for short story collections and the special connection you can have with characters you only spend a short amount of time with.

this collection features eleven stories, each with a unique plot and cast of characters. erskine’s writing is beautiful, every character felt well-rounded and i could imagine the different situations they go through in their daily lives, just from the glimpse that the reader has. i couldn’t put this down, and i’ll definitely be reading her first collection ‘sweet home.’ my favourite stories were mathematics, his mother and nostalgie. because of the subject matter, with so many young men going missing in my home town over the last few years, his mother has a special place in my heart.

3 star overall.

My first Wendy Erskine, i did have a good time reading this one there were definitely some stories that I really connected with and enjoyed but at the same time I just can’t push past the fact there were many I just didn’t enjoy and it’s so sad, I wanted to love this collection so much more than I did but sadly that’s not the way the cookie crumbles in some instances.

I have to admit I am not really a reader of short stories. I’m just not very good at diving into separate stories that have nothing to do with each other within a book. I almost always want more after finishing a story, to learn more about certain characters. Two stories I really liked were ‘Cell’ and ‘Mathematics’. If they would have the length of a novel, I would certainly read both!
Thank you Pan Macmillan and Netgalley for the ARC.

Dance Move is another magnificent collection of stories from the highly talented Wendy Erskine.

The characters in her stories feel so real and you become emotionally attached to them and the situations they find themselves in.

A collection of short stories about ordinary people and moments made extraordinary through the writing, some are particularly Northern Irish and if you're from there you'll know what I mean, and if you're not well this will help you understand. Fabulous

With thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC in exchange for a review.

A wonderful collection of stories of daily life situations that break your heart! Can't wait to read more by this author.

Dance Move is an absorbing collection of Northern Irish short stories,focussing on characters who feel very real and well realised. I enjoyed encountering the protagonists, especially the middle aged women - normally an underexplored demographic of fiction.

I'll be looking out for more work by Wendy Erskine.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

4.5 rounded down

This is a bold statement to make but I reckon Wendy Erskine is a contemporary master of the short story. I thoroughly enjoyed her debut collection, Sweet Home published in 2018, and this new collection is a comparable - maybe even better - in terms of bringing together an excellent selection of stories of contemporary Northern Ireland.

I love that the stories are almost exclusively centred around female protagonists, including many in middle age. The most memorable include the titular story which follows a mother who is struggling to deal with her daughter's teenage years (the tension in this story was palpable!), "His Mother" which centres on a mother roaming the streets in the wake of her son's disappearance, and "Momento Mori" which follows a couple whose almost literal front doorstep becomes the site of an awful incident and the fallout that takes place after this incident occurs.

Highly recommended! I'm already excited to see what Erskine writes next.

I picked up this book because I have recently been on a short stories kick and have to say I found it rather disappointing. Billed as a collection of short stories which are revealing snapshots into the domestic lives and chance encounters of ordinary people and laying bare all the joy, humour, tragedy and farce that lie therein, I found it hard to drum up any level of interest in these characters Having never read any of Erskine's work before I found her writing style reminiscent of my experience when I read anything by Sally Rooney, She seems overly obsessed with the minutiae of the characters lives but not in a good way. The stories are filled with unnecessary detail and rambling inner dialogues with the eventual outcome being that as a reader I felt cold and detached from these stories where I didn't get a sense of character nor is there any real plot to them.

It's not that I don't think Erskine is a good writer, more that this style of writing is not for me. I do think It might appeal to fans of Sally Rooney in that nothing happens and you don;t really get any feel that the characters are fleshed out or explored.

I was a huge fan of Wendy Erskine’s previous short story collection ‘Sweet home’ so have been eagerly anticipating this release for a while. It doesn’t disappoint.

There’s a wonderful flow to each of the stories, so much so that I had to restrict myself to one at a time, to make them last that bit more. The dialogue is so wonderfully crisp and it feels like you have you have been parachuted into the lives of the characters.

What is it that Wendy Erskine does so well? In each story we seem to be heading somewhere in the characters past, somewhere that explains their current thoughts, actions or emotions a bit better. They all seem so real - you can go from laughter, to tears and the ridiculous within a few pages. All of lifes rich tapestry is here.

Loneliness is certainly a factor in some of the characters lives, from the cleaner who makes a shocking discovery whilst working for a shady employer in ‘Mathematics’ to the grief of the mother taking down the missing posters of her son in ‘His mother.’ There’s also grief in the emotional ‘Momento Mori’, one of my favourites, ( ‘She’d never really liked cut flowers. They sucked the water greedily from the vase but they knew they were on the way out, dying as everyone admired their beauty) which also comes with a satisfying punch in the mouth delivered. I think the author makes a Hitchcock style cameo here too.

There’s also a creeping sense of unease in ‘Bildungsroman’ about a teenage boy going to lodge with a stranger, and ‘Max and Gloria’ about an academic going on a road trip with a care home worker.

The wonderfully titled ‘Secrets Bonita Beach Krystal Cancun’ features a trip to Portrush that set off a few memories of a rainy afternoon of my own, whilst ‘Nostalgie’ about a faded singer went a direction I didn’t expect. (“He swallows the vocals, embarrassed and impatient to be done, looking with envy at that balloon, aloof, where the wall meets the ceiling.’) I loved the local vernacular when it popped up and some of the settings could only be in the north of Ireland.

One of the most unsettling stories for me was the longest one, ‘Cell’, I think because it took me a while to work out what was happening. When I did, it left me more uneasy; it’s all about feeling lonely and joining a group and falling under their spell, with disastrous consequences. The title story is also another favourite, the mother struggling with her daughter getting older as well as realising she’s probably going to be becoming a carer in her later years.

A number of times whilst reading these stories I remembered the old adage about not to be judging a person before walking a mile in their shoes. With small details, Wendy Erskine does a fine job of writing these characters in a way that you don’t sit in judgement on them, as their thoughts and feelings seem all too real.  I can’t recommend this collection or the previous one enough.

Thanks to NetGalley and Pan MacMillan for the ARC.

I wanted more of Dance Move, of course, because the stories are spectacular, but I could also see that each of them told a complete and expansive tale in a short space, and I think that’s the mark of an excellent collection.

A masterfully written novel which makes the ordinary, every-day antics something to revel in. The discomfort of this had me hooked and I've not read something quite like it.

This is my first experience of Wendy Erksine's short stories set in Northern Ireland, and I can only marvel at her abilities to capture people, painting authentic pictures of their characters with so few words and the wide range of circumstances they find themselves in, including within families, their pasts, traumas, feelings, relationships, the unexpected, the tragedies, the idiosyncratic, and the joys. She has a real ear for dialogue, there is dark humour and humanity in her astutely observed, unvarnished and insightful writing. Despite the short length of the stories, Erskine had me totally immersed in the worlds she creates, and the characters and scenarios she imagines.

To give you a taste of her fiction, we have Roberta who cleans short lets for a living, working for Mr Dalzell, who finds a young girl that she takes home, kitting her and buying her supplies, and taking her to school, finding herself reflecting on her own difficulties at school. We follow Mrs Dallesandro, her preparations for celebrating her 23rd wedding anniversary and her significant memories of her past, Marty and Rhonda attend a birthday party at her sister's home, and a mother is intent on removing the missing posters of her son, Curtis, noticing, almost indignantly, that there are now new posters of the latest missing person. Kate struggles with her rebellious 13 year old daughter, Clara (who has no intention of doing ballet), and her unsuitable friend, Stacey, knowing she will have to take over the care of her brother, Mark, on the death of her parents.

An academic film professor gives a lift to a care home employee to a film festival, only for them to come across an accident, and a young man on a work placement in Belfast finds himself in a surprising relationship, even acquiring an inheritance, from the woman he stays with. There was not a story I did not like, and amongst my favourites are Bildungsroman and Momento Mori. A fantastic short collection that I recommend highly. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

This collection was so good I had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to stick my head out the window.

I find Wendy Erskine's stories unnerving and strangely comforting, and there's something so remarkable about her writing that it slows you down, makes you take in every word and revel in it. That level of skill and control is wild. She is, without a doubt, one of the short story GOATs.

What a stunning book! I loved the writing and there were so many moments where it broke my heart. I can't wait to read more by this author.