Review: Dance with Me by Heidi Cullinan
Okay… first things first: five out of
five stars obviously. This book is so adamantly, obviously superior
to 90% of the gay romantic fiction being published that I feel like
assigning it a comparative rank seems juvenile. At this level of
craft, can the five stars be in question?. I feel like when you have
a gifted, warm, generous writer who consistently pushes into new
terrain with grace and affection, the question is not
if you will enjoy the book but why. The issue won’t be the stars, it
will be the ways the stars align in each book.
I’ve said it before but it bears
repeating, Cullinan writes
her books. She doesn’t merely
type them and hope for the best; she doesn’t
cobble them together out
of half-digested borrowings; she doesn’t
regurgitate the same bland
book over and over in an Ourobouros of homoerotic hackwork. Cullinan
writes; she writes beautifully; and she has written a marvelous book
that you will enjoy if you have any interest in sexy, subtle, snarky
romance fiction.
Dance with Me is a contemporary Odd Couple
narrative about two men who shouldn’t work together, but almost
cannot work apart. As with many of her books, Cullinan starts with a
“cute” story germ that almost feels like a high-end porn setup
(Dancer and Jock tussle!) and then refuses to take the easy, sleazy
road to their HEA. The story straddles the worlds of dance and
football at several levels of professionalism and expertise… As
always, Cullinan revels in the particulars of her characters’ lives.
Her characters inhabit the worlds of sports and arts from limelight
to ruin fully and viscerally because she spends time aggregating the
tiny slivers of reality that make their jobs feel like more than a
costumes her characters wear between sexy times and witty banter.
And let me tell you: the times, they are
sexy and the banter, it is witty. The engaging reality
of these two men slams into you from the first intense pages of
personal setback with set up the plot. With typical panache, she
draws clear parallels between the competitiveness and equilibrium
native to all athletes of stage and field… and then keeps her men
off balance for most of the book with delicious results. Cullinan
has a knack for building these meat-n-bone men and then dragging
them towards their happy endings over mud and marble.
Personal aside: I should add that I come
to this book with a strange skew. I grew up in theatre as a
song-n-dance guy till I was in my mid-20s, so I know several
“Lauries” and have had close contact with the strange overlapping
worlds of the professional dancer. Likewise, I grew up in Texas,
where Football is a religion and semi-pro games devolve often into
brutal free-for-alls. I also have friends who compete (and teach) on
the international ballroom circuit. Those familiarities might have
worked against me; Cullinan always does her homework, but knowing
turf intimately can work against the enjoyment of a story. Of
course, I needn’t have worried...
Semi-pro football player Ed starts the
book with a brutal, tragic injury that reroutes his entire life for
better and worse: a promising athlete doomed to cubicle hell. Picked
out in snarky, snappy humor, Ed offers up all kinds of sexy he-man
goodness without sliding into cliché. Unmanned by his failings, his
regret, and his debilitating injuries, his journey presents the
bedrock of the book. Though the narrative uses a split third person
POV, in some ways the story
belongs to Ed a bit more because the plot points hinge on his
transformations and decisions. My sense was that Cullinan felt more
connected to Ed, and so I did as well.
Laurie tended to be more objectified and
held at arm’s length, even when he controlled the POV; his
detachment and neuroses (n.b. completely characteristic of dancers)
made him into the object for Ed’s subject, so that although they
shared the story, I experienced Laurie at a slight remove. By
the same token, Laurie’s journey from artistic paralysis to
explosive release provides much of the book’s sparkle. It’s a clever
choice because Cullinan ends up using the intense, intricate
realities of dance (in several forms) to bring her characters
together and to navigate the rough terrain between them. Those dance
details weave seamlessly through the entire novel. Magical stuff. I
especially appreciated the fact that both men refused to capitulate,
but both managed to compromise believably. Theirs felt like a real
relationship: warm, human, and humorous.
And the sex!?! Holy Moly, Mother of Lube
is the sex hot! The inexorable dance these fellas do around and
against each other proves excruciating and exquisite. Again,
Cullinan refuses to kick back and crank out the same old, same old.
No two of her characters have the same kind of sex or the same
desires. She knows better.
The intimacy between her heroes specifies and defines their
relationships; every interaction, erotic or otherwise, builds and
transmutes her characters. And because dance is inherently physical
and performative she gets to play with voyeurism, exhibitionism,
obsession, flexibility, and dominance between Ed and Laurie as they
dance towards and around each other. Raunchy, smoldering tenderness
unfolds and entangles them.
Likewise, Cullinan also accomplishes a
neat trick in this book, using injury and defeat as a way to render
her men fragile without making them
passive. The cleverness in
that? Two aggressive, opinionated males flesh themselves out
three-dimensionally by revealing their flaws and handicaps: lovely.
In that context, gentle treatment only underscores their pain (and
masculinity). It’s a delicious M/M seam between behaviors that need
to be both butch and vulnerable. Ed and Laurie learn to act as stem
and flower in turn for each other, and the spot-on push/pull of
partnered dance spills over into their lives.
Do I have any reservations about
Dance with Me? Meh. Minor quibbles. There’s a looseness to some of
the connective tissue in the subplots; interestingly the squishy
bits all pivot on Laurie (who as I’ve mentioned, did seem less
central at times). The initial public “ruining” of Laurie
never landed with me (because of my familiarity with the dance and
ballroom worlds) and felt like a melodramatic device more than an
actual catastrophe. The reconciliation with Laurie’s mother felt
oddly tidy and slick. And most noticeably, there is a
Mickey-n-Judy “putting on a show” subplot in the second half that I
saw coming a little too early and that ultimately imploded in a way
that made it feel artificial and unnecessary. And yet, the radiant,
redemptive ending sort of swept that minor clutter out of
consciousness.
Totally dug this one. I loved getting to
know these two men and will definitely read it again… more than
once. If you haven’t already bought it you should. And if you own it
and have dallied, you’re missing out.
Dance with Me offers
righteous moves and technique to spare.