Review by Karen Tintori
Dance It Up! A Journey to find the End of Grief. Ovunque Siamo Press, 2026. 200 pages. 16.95
Susan Caperna Lloyd’s second memoir, Dance It Up!: A Journey to Find the End of Grief, from Ovunque Siamo Press, is a raw, brave, and spellbinding story of her long dance with grief following the death of her sister, Angela. When she and I were introduced years ago at an Italian American Studies Conference (IASA) it took me a minute to connect the intense brunette before me with a book I’d read and loved more than a decade earlier. Piqued by my interest in all things Madonne Nere, I’d devoured No Pictures on My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily – her first memoir, which Ovunque Siamo Press re-released in 2024 in an anniversary edition.
Memoir is a tough genre, both to write and to bring into the world. To dig that deeply into one’s own life is akin to slitting open both wrists and bleeding onto the page, to paraphrase a quote attributed to numerous writers ranging from Hemingway to Red Smith.
Everyone has a story. Few ring with enough universality to make it into print. Fewer still are those authors who, after revealing a segment of their life to critical acclaim, successfully bring forth a second. Or, as in Caperna Lloyd’s case, are already at work on a third.
Her sisters Angela’s unexpected Christmas-time death, following closely on the heels of multiple deaths in their family, was a loss that rocked Caperna Lloyd and spurred her multi-country journey to learn to dance.
Dance is not just a metaphor for the hard-fought healing journey she embarks on, but the reason for her every step along the way. For buried deeper than the many relatives she mourns are the secrets that Angela took to her grave. Secrets Caperna Lloyd slowly uncovers as she seeks solace by learning dance after dance after dance, beginning with the one in particular that was her sister’s passion.
With Angela’s red flamenco shoes in tow, urged on by their mother, she flies to Spain to study flamenco. The trip is the fulfillment of a promise, a solo voyage on an adventure the sisters had often talked about but had never taken. With flamenco such an all-encompassing passion of Angela’s, Caperna Lloyd determines to honor her sister by struggling to master the steps.
In Spain, she learns of the Roma people’s influence on flamenco, and of their connection to Sara Kali, their saint, and discovers the goddess/saint’s sacred dance. Her quest to explore Kali’s ritual dance and its intrinsic ties to spiritual healing, takes Caperna Lloyd to France to join up with a Roma pilgrimage that is celebrating Saint Sara. Kali’s roots in India spur still further travel as she crisscrosses that country, hungry to learn the physical steps, the music, the rhythms, the pacing, the death rituals surrounding Sara Kali. There, during her many months’ long search to move from grief and into healing, the dance teachers she follows lead her, in turn, to spiritual teachers. Her vivid firsthand experiences, as a bystander and then as a participant in ancient ceremonies of death and rebirth are magical in their telling.
Being that Caperna Lloyd is also a filmmaker and photographer of some renown, I initially flipped through Dance It Up! before I began to read looking for the striking images she is known for. Surprised, and a touch disappointed, I found no photographic record of the characters she met, the places she haunted on her quest.
The book didn’t need them.
With prose this cinematic, evocative, and multi-sensory, the reader assumes Angela’s place as Susan Caperna Lloyd’s travel companion. From Oregon to Spain, to France, into the Himalayas, and then from Kolkotta to Rajhasthan, trekking across the vast landscape of India, we are there, fully present at her side, moving to her rhythm, a partner in the dance.
With Dance it Up! Caperna Lloyed entrances us with a poignant and moving dance born of loss and love. By journey’s end, she not only regains her footing but masters the hard won footwork so necessary to dance away from grief.
Bio:
Karen Tintori is an author of both fiction and non-fiction books.
