Currently reading
Alex
The Glass Room
Peter the Great: His Life and World
If I Can't Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children
Skin Deep
The Good Daughter
A Boy in Winter
The Tie That Binds
The Idiot (Everyman's Library, #254)
The Velvet Hours
The Ballroom
Beautifully written, thought provoking novel set in an Asylum.The Ballroom is a tale of unlikely love set in an Asylum on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors in 1911.
Male and Female patients were segregated and the only time they came together was on Friday nights for the weekly dance.
Churchill as a newly appointed home Secretary in 1908 was eager to solve the social problem of the "Feeble Minded" and he had ambitions for compulsory sterilisation. While his ambitions failed The Mental Deficiency Act established powers to incarcerate those believed to be "feeble-minded" in purpose built asylums where men and women were segregated, this ensured their inability to reproduce without the need for medical interventions.
I had previously read and loved [b:Wake|18041980|Wake|Anna Hope|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1385050320s/18041980.jpg|24943824] [bc:Wake|18041981|Wake|Anna Hope|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1385050042s/18041981.jpg|24943824] by this author and purchased The Ballroom in Hardback for my bookshelf.
While I really enjoyed this novel it is a slow burner and did take a good few chapters for me to get into the story but Anna Hope's rich narrative and thought provoking plot kept me turning the pages and I just loved the novel and was so glad I struck with it.
I adored the characters of Ella and John as they are so beautifully written. The plot is atmospheric and the setting of the Yorkshire Moors is vivid and stark. I hated parting company with this novel but I feel the setting, the writing and the characters will stay with me for a long time.
