WITCHES' DANCE

A smart, ambitious, timely book about what it takes to succeed as an artist and how we hold male genius on a pedestal at the expense of women's success.

Witches' Dance is a powerful, multilayered story about a violin prodigy and her determined mother, who both fall under the spell of an enigmatic music teacher privately suffering a long-held delusion that he is the reincarnation of a 19th century violin virtuoso. Hilda Greer is underperforming in the public-school orchestra until she wins a scholarship to take summer lessons at the Cambridge Conservatory. Under the tutelage of Philip Manns, the greatest modern interpreter of Paganini who suffered a fall from grace years before, Hilda learns what it takes to succeed as an artist, and isn't sure she wants to do what it takes to get there. But her strikingly beautiful mother Claire won't accept anything less than greatness. Switching perspectives from Hilda, Claire, and Phillip, orbiting the world of internationally famous musicians and the has-beens clinging to an artistic life, Witches' Dance asks: why do we forgive some madness but not others; how do young women learn that the only power they can assert is sexual; how do mothers repeat or subvert the lessons they were taught as daughters - and where are all the female geniuses of history?