Fingerloose: A Review of Dance in the Key of Love by Marianne K. Martin

The lesbian community of Ann Arbor needs Redemption: Capital R, learn to walk after being hit by a heterosexual drunk driver, eat pizza and watch Footloose with a gay dance chorographer, have dinner at Applebee’s with former lover Redemption. The crimes of a lost and wandering young bar dyke return to haunt her as she struggles to elevate her passion for dancing above the faux wood of the dance club floor. Finding herself forced to face the fall-out of a five minute fling in a bathroom stall; our heroine realizes the importance of cross-word puzzles and an alcoholic mother’s love.
In Marianne Martin’s sequel to Dawn of the Dance, we find a cast of lovably lesbian characters confronting life’s problems while attempting to assist a debilitated dyke with an interpretive dance production of Dirty Dancing. In parallel with this quirky romance, a somewhat two-dimensional detective spends a lot of time with his grandson while telling his daughter all the confidential stuff he is investigating.
Martin doesn’t exactly give any real substance to her straight characters. It is fair to say that in the world of Dance in the Key of Love all straight guys, with one exception, are violently abusive cops and all straight women are either battered recovering alcoholics or battered emerging alcoholics. While in the parallel story, real depth is given to the Ann Arbor crowd. This narrative dichotomy is perplexing in so far as at times it seems to unfairly represent a lesbian worldview.
Without divulging too much of the plot, this dichotomy comes to a highly symbolic boiling point in which we find our heroine handcuffed in the back of a cruiser eavesdropping on the detective as he is told that his daughter is in the hospital due to a mild to severe case of heterosexual battering.
Martin’s narrative lends itself to very revealing and beautiful moments in which friends relate painfully true feelings like “The families we make often offer us more love than the ones we are born into.” With skilled writing and attention to detail Martin opens the reader to the harsh difficulties of the lesbian world while seemingly undermining her character’s struggles by limiting the reader’s view of the world at large.