Apparently, I preordered this! Which is confusing because it’s paperback. I’m not really sure why I got it, but it was a pleasant surprise for the week while I was between books!
Dark and Deepest Red follows two storylines. In modern day, Rosella has remade a pair of red shoes that her grandparents once attempted to destroy and they have attached themselves to her feet, causing her to dance and seek out the help of Emil, a childhood friend who she’s grown distant from. In the distant past, Lala is trying to assimilate into the city of Stratsbourg, where women have been coming down with a dancing sickness that keeps them dancing until they fall down dead.
This is another one of those books that really benefited from being a bedtime book because I don’t think I was feeling it at all. The two storylines feel disjointed from one another, and I’m not sure how they were intended to play off of one another. The dancing sickness exists in both places, but that seems to be the only thing connecting the two.
On top of that, the story is very much about discrimination more than it is about the dancing sickness and the thing I was reading for felt like it was more of a background element. Though I don’t usually need an explanation, I don’t think I ever figured out either what was causing the sickness or how it was solved, and over the course of the book I found myself more and more annoyed that we weren’t focusing on it. Other people seem to really like it, though, so it is likely more that this is not my kind of book.