Pretending To Dance Books in Order

The Pretending to Dance grouping delves into one woman’s coming-of-age and the long shadow her family’s secrets cast over adulthood. It includes the short story The Dance Begins and the novel Pretending to Dance, which together trace the life of Molly Arnette and her remarkable father.

In The Dance Begins, readers meet Graham Arnette, a psychologist and practitioner of “pretend” therapy who is losing his ability to walk due to a progressive illness. Living with his wife, their young daughter Molly and extended family on a hundred acres in the North Carolina mountains, Graham longs to dance again. As the family turns an old springhouse into a playhouse for six-year-old Molly, buried tensions and grievances come to the surface, and Graham must use the same tools he offers his patients to keep his family from splintering.

Pretending to Dance picks up years later, with Molly now an adult living in San Diego. She and her husband are pursuing adoption after infertility, a process that requires intrusive questions about her background. Molly has built her marriage on half-truths about her childhood on Morrison Ridge, claiming her mother is dead and avoiding any mention of the complicated web of relationships that once sustained and hurt her.

The novel alternates between Molly’s present-day struggle to be honest enough for an adoption agency and her memories of the summer she was fourteen. Those flashbacks reveal a father she adored, whose illness shaped every corner of family life; a mother whose choices confused and angered her; and Amalia, the enigmatic woman who taught her to dance, both literally and emotionally. The shocking event that drove Molly from North Carolina—and the way her family used “pretending” as both therapy and avoidance—slowly come into focus.

Across the two pieces, Chamberlain explores how children interpret adult decisions, what it means to be a good parent or daughter, and whether you can build a healthy family on top of a hidden past. The mountain setting, with its tight-knit community and private acreage, becomes a kind of character in its own right.

Readers who enjoy layered family dramas with both teen and adult perspectives will get the most out of starting with The Dance Begins and then moving into Pretending to Dance, where the questions raised in the prequel reverberate through Molly’s choices decades later.