(courtesy Text Publishing)
As someone who spent much of my childhood and youth stuck well and truly out of the mainstream – that’s partly true now really but adulthood affords you far more options for ameliorating its worst effects and doing it on your terms – bullied and harassed, there’s something truly wonderful about reading about a character who well and truly comes into their own.
It’s what we all want – find our people, discover our voice, live a life that feels like it’s truly ours, authentic and alive with possibility and happiness – and so, when a character like Patch Smith from Alice Boyle’s affectingly funny, thoughtful and damn near delightful Dancing Barefoot (taken from a Patti Smith song; you’ll find out why soon) truly comes into her own idiosyncratic queer self, and finds love into the bargain, well, your heart just soars.
And keeps soaring and not because Patch’s story is all red bows and joy and life suddenly fulfilled.
In fact, like the average mid-teenager she has her hands full just figuring out life, which is in flux in a way that really does happen later in life and without the tools that adulthood grants you to at least have a chance at successfully working it all out.
Patch, a nickname that’s stands in for Patti – so, yes, Patti Smith, a “gift” from her music obsessed, record store owning single dad – goes to Mountford, a very high end private school on scholarship, and really only has one friend, Edwin, who is currently transitioning and who needs all the support that Patch can provide.
She hands her phone to me. With trembling fingers, I type my number in and give it back to her. She fills in the rest of my details and holds her phone up to show me. She’s saved me as ‘Bean Queen’.
‘See you at school, Patch.’ She flashes her megawatt smile and then disappears into the drizzle.
If life were straightforward and uncomplicated (when is it ever?), Patch would focus solely on doing well at school (tick!) and being the absolute bestie she can be to Edwin (tick-ish) but she’s grappling with whether there’s a stepmother in the offing, she’s secretly gay and in love with gorgeous school basketball star Evie Vanhoutte with whom she’s shared maybe five words of conversation over four and a half years.
That’s a lot of emotional weight to carry on her frizzy hair-fringed shoulders, and Patch is resigned to being socially isolated, and to never having her unrequited crush met by the prettiest girl in school (who, it turns out, is actually pretty lovely and grounded).
But then an art class involving ink and a ruined school uniform puts her and Evie into very close contact and to Patch’s delighted astonishment, they become friends.
Happiness! Joy! Ecstasy! I mean, right, what could possibly be better?
In a perfect world, nothing, but her friendship with Evie, which opens up a world of parties and lunches at school in the school kids’ gazebo – yes, Mountford has gazebos and fountains and just about everything Patch’s home neighbourhood doesn’t – comes with one Abigail Richards aside, a mega rich girl who is MEAN.
Seriously, caustically, nastily mean and who doesn’t take too kindly to Patch “stealing” her best friend and who makes it clear that she’s not going to take this lying down (on presumably super high thread count sheets spun by a widowed master craftswoman in the highlands of Ethiopia).
(courtesy Text Publishing)
So, there’s a LOT going on, and while Patch is very happy to be friends with the girl of her dreams, she’s also more than a little terrified and confused by the signals she’s getting from Evie who may like her, may not like her, oh lordy, who actually knows?
Not Patch, and while a girl can dream, and she does so in ways with which anyone who has found not only their true love but surety in their sexuality will readily identify, the road to romance everlasting is not a smooth one and may come a-cropper on all kinds of obstacles and rocks sitting just under the metaphorical water.
It’s a lot to process on the run and it means that Dancing Barefoot, which is one of the most delightful and well-written feel good queer romances you will read this year, carries quite a bit of emotional heft in its bright, light and dialogue-rich pages.
Patch is one of those protagonists who arrives fully and wonderfully formed in her incompleteness, and as Dancing Barefoot progresses and she comes increasingly grips with who she is, what and who she wants and how to navigate a world that seems determined not to give her any of it, you are moved quite profoundly, especially if you’re queer yourself (which this reviewer is), in ways you often don’t see coming.
I feel hollow.
Edwin raises his eyebrows at me. He pulls the ice away from his face and says, ‘I think we might’ve overstayed out welcome.’
‘Roger that.’ I sigh. ‘You stay here. I’ll go get our coats.’
And that is the DELIGHT of this novel.
It is funny and rom-comy and clever and wondrously alive, but it’s also happy to dive deep in questions of identity and sexuality, of community and belonging, with the added joy being that it does so in our way that doesn’t weigh down and sink Dancing Barefoot under a metric ton of existential rumination.
It acknowledges that life is unwieldy and complicated and that just because you get your heart’s desire, or at least the possibility of it, doesn’t mean that suddenly all the pieces of your life fall magically into place.
Life takes work, and lots of it, and while fairytales do happen, and in many ways Patch absolutely gets hers, that doesn’t mean that all the things that beleaguered you up until that point suddenly go away.
In fact, they almost get a little worse, with even the good things like her soul deep friendship with Edwin, who may be expansive and outgoing but who’s deal with a massive transition to his true self which is exciting and overwhelming all at once, not exactly working out as planned.
But the reassuring joy of Dancing Barefoot is that while life is messy and entangled and bewilderingly exhausting, it’s also full of hope and family and friends and the discovery and living out of your authentic self, and much of what makes this wonderful novel so appealing is seeing Patch work through the good and the bad and come out the other side as someone who knows herself far better, who is finally living life on her terms and who has a future so bright she might just need the proverbial sunnies to deal with it all.