Keith Warren

Dancing by the Light of the Moon Keith Warren

Ellie is sixteen, beautiful, passionate and troubled. Mike is forty four and saddled (he'd say) with a dull marriage and a mortgage. They fall in hopeless, all-consuming love. An age-inappropriate relationship? Infatuation or manipulation? Love or lust?Ellie is still at school. She's clever and perceptive. Dr. Mike is her teacher, almost at the pinnacle of his career. An abuse of power? Technically, yes. But is it clear who is doing the grooming here, and why?Perhaps things are not always as they seem. In any event, after a court trial in which Ellie's sexuality is put under a microscope, they elope and marry. Time and place are suspended while they live in a little shack on a Devonian cliff - the magical but entirely unreal land where the bong tree grows. They watch the beach and the sea and dance in the moonlight. But things unravel as both of them confront their age-gap relationship and Ellie struggles with her past. Which factor is the most destructive?In this forthright novel, the author challenges our assumptions and causes us to reflect on those stories we've read in the papers about students seduced by teachers. It is a shocking, amusing, savagely humorous, often vulgar and yet thoughtful story concerned with, first and foremost, taboo love. But other things are interwoven too: time and landscape; religious hypocrisy; contradiction and paradox; disillusionment and reconciliation and the occasional absurdity and transience of human love played out against the enduring backdrop of the ancient Jurassic Coast. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AS "PLEASE, SIR, I LOVE YOU!"