The Ballroom by Anna Hope

From Goodreads: 
1911: Inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors, where men and women are kept apart by high walls and barred windows,
there is a ballroom vast and beautiful. For one bright evening every week they come together and dance. When John and Ella meet, it is a dance that will change two lives forever.

Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, THE BALLROOM is a historical love story. It tells a page-turning tale of dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

Like most of the books I buy these days, I bought The Ballroom by Anna Hope on a sort of whim. I was in Chapters a few weeks ago, just browsing for books to read over my reading week. It was the second book of four I read that wasn't for school on my reading week, the first being The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick (that review coming soon to a blog near you!). Right away upon starting the book, I felt instantly connected to the main character Ella and her plight inside an early twentieth-century asylum. Hope's prose is lyrical and rhythmic. The story provides an insight into how patients at an asylum were treated in the pre-World War I era, regardless of their mental health status, and you see that it might not be the patients that are the most troubled ...

Weekly in this asylum, men and women, who are forcibly separated, are selected to join together at the ballroom for weekly balls. It is here where our two protagonists Ella and John form their unbreakable bond and herein unfolds our love story in an almost epistolary form, with John writing letters to Ella, which are read to by her friend Clem (as Ella cannot read herself), which, if done correctly (as it is in this book) really pays off. Elsewhere in the novel is the main antagonist, Charles, who goes from a disgruntled and intense doctor and master of the band that plays at the weekly balls, to the deranged and deluded man obsessed with eugenics, raising the question of who the troubled ones really are.

I truly enjoyed this book. I tore through it in about a day and could not bear to put it down when I had to go to work. Hope's prose is beautiful and simplistic and does well in splitting up the perspectives between Ella, John and Charles, showing each side of the story from different perspectives, filling in the blanks. The latter part of the novel is both heartbreaking and uplifting as is the overarching message and theme of finding love where love cannot be seen. It is one of those books that cannot leave your brain. I loved reading this book, and I will definitely will be reading more of Anna Hope's novels in the future. This book easily became one of my all-time favourites soon after I finished reading it. I definitely recommend this book, especially to those who enjoy historical fiction and mental illness in literature, and I give it a 5/5