One week before her sixteenth birthday, Lotte Kahs is kidnapped by a figure she calls the fiend—a dangerous and beguiling stranger with ambiguous unnaturalness both subtle and terrifying. To escape her conflicting feelings created by her abductor's frightful cruelty and equally disturbing affection, Lotte concentrates on memories of what moved her—music and the emotions awakened while dancing, sources of motivation connecting her to youth as she prepares for what's to come: the struggle between the fiend and herself to understand one another through harrowing acts of betrayal and unforgettable discoveries of self, necessity, desire, and each other.
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The Teaching Emotion's simultaneous suspension of and demand for reality combined with incidents from Lotte's past, the poignant recall of conversation, equivocal internal dialogue, and hypnotic rhythm results in a complex and jarring narrative that explores headlong a distressing paradox—the ache for and denial of something more inexplicable than oneself.
The review of this Book prepared by Meg Holle
