And This Shall Be My Dancing Day: A Novel

By Jennifer Kavanagh. Roundfire Books, 2023. 192 pages. $16.95/paperback; $9.99/eBook.

Emma, the protagonist of And This Shall Be My Dancing Day, is a middle-aged classics librarian in a fusty London club. She lives outside the city in a tiny house with a garden and two “moggies” (cats for the non-British reader), and rides her bicycle and a bus to work every day. Her commute invites the reader to enjoy the city and country surroundings as well as her reflections on the joys and trials of gardening, a lost love, and the decades of her quiet life. Challenging her routine is a left-leaning, protest-marching sister; their sibling struggles ring true. Supporting the pattern are an aging neighbor and, of course, her feline friends, Perky and Pinky. This is a cozy but not patronized character—and book. Quaker author Jennifer Kavanagh respects her heroine and her reader.

Relationships are not easy for solitary Emma, least of all the relationship with her own body and its unfolding realities (failing eyesight, menopause), and she wonders if change to her ordered life is possible, let alone desirable. A mysterious open doorway on her morning commute ushers in Nicola, a younger woman whose brother just died. Though quite unlike Emma, Nicola emerges as a friend and a catalyst, introducing her to a Roma dancer, human trafficking, and the politics of nongovernmental and governmental agencies dealing with Brexit and European migration—concerns the author knows firsthand.

I appreciated the quiet contemplation and joy in the writing and was always eager to pick up this fine, slim novel to find out what more Emma would learn about herself and her world. One day, for example, while wandering around a bustling neighborhood, she is arrested by a large sculpture representation of a sunflower head; the title of the work is “Fibonacci Flip.” Her curiosity takes over: “wasn’t Fibonacci something to do with the golden ratio?” Later, she investigates more online and ponders:

the notion that nature has a numbering system, an order underlying everything. . . . But, according to what she read, everything that grows confirms its innate proportionality: the arrangement of the heart of a sunflower, of leaves on a stem, of branches on a tree—all unconsciously maximising light. That the beauty of proportionality could lead to such efficiency. Now there was a thought!

But Emma’s order is disrupted: her niece, raised by hippie parents, becomes a cop; her neighbor must move; her beloved job is no longer the focus of her life; and she willingly becomes part of a flashmob. Her dancing day is not “tomorrow,” as the English carol goes, but “this” day. Emma is ready to dance.

Anglophiles will be charmed: I could easily imagine the “sit-up-and-beg” bicycle Emma rides to work; some references, however—namely choral dance, Oyster card, winceyettes, and RoadPeace—sent me to Google. Jennifer Kavanagh is an associate tutor at Woodbrooke study center in the United Kingdom and has had a long career in both publishing and activism. This is her third novel of more than a dozen published works, including the recent Do Quakers Pray? in the Quaker Quicks series.

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Michele Sands is a retired librarian who worships with Upper Susquehanna Quarterly on Zoom and with Collington Worship Group at the Kendal-affiliated retirement community where she lives in Bowie, Md. Sunflowers grow in her garden.