Beautiful writing overwhelmed by gloomy content. 3.5/5 stars.

The blurb: Where love is your only escape ….

1911: Inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors, where men and women are kept apart by high walls and barred windows, there is a ballroom vast and beautiful. For one bright evening every week they come together and dance. When John and Ella meet it is a dance that will change two lives forever.

Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, THE BALLROOM is a tale of unlikely love and dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

My take:

Perhaps I’m just an optimistic romantic… but when I read the blurb for The Ballroom I jumped to the conclusion it would be a “love conquers all” story. Well, it’s not.

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