When I Sing, Mountains Dance

A Novel

De: Irene Solà, Mara Faye Lethem - translator

Narrado por: Joe Lewis

A spellbinding novel that places one family's tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself.

Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domenec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to "reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain." He gathers black chanterelles and attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domenec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he'd harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst.

©2019 Irene Solà; English translation copyright 2022 by Mara Faye Lethem; Originally published in 2019 as Canto jo i la muntanya balla by Editorial Anagrama (P)2022 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

How bad it was

The story of this book was so horrible I really didn’t like it. However if you have to read it good luck

Wonderful

The writing is so beautifully poetic! I felt like I was inside of the words.

Not my normal read

This book is at its best when it steps away from the human characters and lets things like the dog, the mushrooms or the witches tell the story as those parts felt really creative and fun to read. The people side of the story didnt really grab me as much and the chapters switch perspective so fast that it was hard to pick up and put down without getting confused. Still worth reading if you can sit with it for a while and let the stranger chapters do their thing.

beautiful phrases and sentences but that’s it

I kept wanting to like this book but did not. There were some beautiful lines and very poetic at times but I didn’t enjoy it at all. I read the whole thing thinking it would get better but it didn’t. It wasn’t for me.

I have now learned to listen to the sample first

This book was not anything I expected and very disappointing. I have listened for about 45 min and am giving up on it. Not my kind of book at all