“ Rosella’s cursed red shoes make her confront how she’s measured herself and her body by white beauty standards,” McLemore explains.
Speaking of belonging, the four main characters’ story arcs have a lot to say on the subject as they interconnect across time and space. That was a moment of absolute magic,” they say, “because I had already decided I wanted to write about ‘The Red Shoes’ and the dancing plague, and here was history whispering that they belonged together all along.” McLemore’s fascination with the medieval Alsatian dancing plagues led them to Strasbourg to research in situ, and that is where they found out that Andersen’s tale “has some likely but little-known historical connections to that specific dancing plague. The other is a reimagining of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Red Shoes” featuring two teenagers living 500 years later in America. This historical episode, and two young characters who live through it, is one of the threads in Anna-Marie McLemore’s astonishing new YA novel, Dark and Deepest Red(Feiwel and Friends, Jan. Many died from exhaustion, heart attack, or stroke.
In 1518, a dancing fever plagued the city of Strasbourg (in modern-day France), causing hundreds of people (predominantly women) to dance for days without stopping.
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