Edna Cormick takes her ferocious shyness, combines it with what she understands to be her proper role in the world, and dedicates herself entirely to husband and home - with fatal results.
Toronto Star: "There is a hypnotic fasination in this revealing first-person account of a woman's descent into madness...a powerful story of obsession, infidelity and retribution"
Globe & Mail: "It creates with considerable intensity the world of a perfectly ordinary woman who decides to murder her husband."
Windsor Star: "A mournful but brilliant song...In this magnificent book Barfoot adds a new and chilling dimension to the old Christian truth that it is only through death that there is life."
Ottawa Citizen: "Hypnotic...impressive....The author leads you through a maze; the tortuosity of the human mind and the influences that direct or misdirect events are unravelled in a spellbinding, empathic way."
London Free Press: "Dancing in the Dark reminds me of Marie Claire Blais's books. It has the same lowering darkness and bloodiness about it, the same sense of the vulnerability of human beings...You can hardly bear to put it down."
Edmonton Journal: "One of those novels so fluently and fluidly styled that you often forget you are reading."
A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel (John Moss): "The sheer brilliance of Barfoot's writing is enough to take your breath away. She is among the best prose stylists of her generation - and yet her prose invariably serves the fiction, brings her character's reality alive in the reader's mind. Dancing in the Dark is a singular achievement by a very important writer."