Dark and Deepest Red
Ratings7
Average rating3.6
With Anna-Marie McLemore's signature lush prose, Dark and Deepest Red pairs the forbidding magic of a fairy tale with a modern story of passion and betrayal. Summer, 1518. A strange sickness sweeps through Strasbourg: women dance in the streets, some until they fall down dead. As rumors of witchcraft spread, suspicion turns toward Lavinia and her family, and Lavinia may have to do the unimaginable to save herself and everyone she loves. Five centuries later, a pair of red shoes seal to Rosella Oliva’s feet, making her dance uncontrollably. They draw her toward a boy who knows the dancing fever’s history better than anyone: Emil, whose family was blamed for the fever five hundred years ago. But there’s more to what happened in 1518 than even Emil knows, and discovering the truth may decide whether Rosella survives the red shoes.
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i think i would've enjoyed this more if i hadn't listened to the audiobook. more thoughts to come
I love this story. There are three parallel stories going on. A girl and a boy in today, and a girl in 16th century Austria.
This is based on the H.C.Andersen fairytale Red Shoes. In it a vain girl loves her beautiful red shoes so much she wears them everywhere and thinks about her shoes when she should be thinking about more important matters, and the shoes get cursed by a “soldier”, so that they dance whether she wishes or not. The shoes dance her off until she asks an executioner cut off her feet, and then the shoes dance off with her feet.
In the book, there's a dancing sickness, and the Romani girl, Lala is accused of having caused it by witchcraft. In modern time the youngsters, Rosella and Emil, are having their own problems to deal with, connected to the shoes.
The epilogue was lovely. I have to say that the fact that I have my own, sweet, kind, loving and loved, trans boy here next to me, makes me love this book even more.
