I became a believer.

When her beloved husband, Jack, died from cancer, Cherie Magnus was set adrift. Cherie and Jack had planned their later lives as a couple. They had even invested in a second home in one of their favorite locations in France, near the Swiss border. But, instead, she found herself living alone in the family home in Los Angeles, her adult sons busy with their own lives. Cherie continued to work as a librarian, and soon the first holidays without Jack came and went. Some of their life-long “couple” friends melted away with Jack’s death. Others turned out to be snakes in the grass, not above taking terrible advantage of Cherie’s sudden widowhood.

But her passion for everything French remained, and Cherie decided to take her vacation alone in Paris, registering for a two-week intensive French language course. It is there that she first met and fell for Olivier, the class instructor and a married man. She returns to LA, but the long-distance relationship is far from over.

THE CHURCH OF TANGO is Cherie Magnus’s no-holds-barred memoir of her renewed search for life after the loss of her much-loved husband. She tells all: her loves, adventures, mistakes, and discoveries. Her story made me go through so many emotions! There she was, poised on the brink of being able to restart her life with her husband as an empty-nester when he was diagnosed with cancer. Later, she, too, received a cancer diagnosis (twice!). So she traveled to strange and exotic places to live and dance and love again.

I was so comfortable with the author’s writing style. Her words flowed, and I willingly followed. I admired her gutsy approach to following her heart to experience new things, hone her skills in the world of dance, and live life to the fullest. Several times I paused to seek out YouTube examples of the dance styles she was exploring or research more about a new-to-me term or look on a map to find the exotic location she was visiting. It was chockful of interesting tidbits and facts along with her absorbing story. The descriptions of the culture of the places she was living and especially that of the tango dance clubs were fascinating. I was delighted to see the author has additional books (just waiting for me!) about other times of her exciting life. I highly recommend THE CHURCH OF TANGO for readers that enjoy women’s memoirs (this is a must-read!), memoirs related to dance, and true stories of living life to its best advantage.

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy from the author through France Book Tours. ( )

Choices. This book is a story about choices, what to do when a beloved partner passes away from a dreadful disease, how to cope with life afterwards. Cherie Magnus felt devastated when her beloved partner died from cancer at a fairly young age in his mid 50's. They had lived a dream life, filled with art, dance, concerts, antiques in a beautiful Californian home. Vacations abroad to a home in Europe were something they enjoyed. Now, a young widow, with two sons and a bleak financial outlook, Cherie fell into a year long depression. She decided to follow her late husband's advice, to sell their marital home to raise money for her future, and follow her lifelong passion to learn French in Paris.
After falling in love with her handsome French teacher, Cherie decides to leave the US and move in with him. Since her mother was in a nursing home, suffering from dementia and her sons had moved away to start their adult life, Cherie feels there is nothing to keep her in California. Unfortunately, Olivier is not her knight in white armour, sent to lead her into another dream life. Before she leaves for France, she receives her own cancer diagnosis. Life has sent her another kick.
Cherie makes a series of bad decisions. Her financial outlook receives a couple of hard blows, from "trusted" friends, who end up to be hustlers. She makes a series of bad choices in narcissistic men. What saves her is her love of dance, which she has followed from her ballet days, to her country phase, to European folk dance. Her discovery of tango in Argentina really brings her weary, scarred body and mind to life. But even there, life has it's ups and downs, with smoky dance halls, booze, one night stands and more narcissistic partners.
Cherie's life has gone from magical to a life of difficult challenges in many dark places. I don't know if I would agree with all the choices, that she made. But when faced with your own potential impending death, you find out what is really important in life. Some of her choices do seem unreal. I can't imagine dragging a grand piano into all her different apartments, especially since I know from experience , that they take up more room than you realize and can throw your whole house plan into disarray! And she moved into some tiny places, even keeping her frig outdoors! Since she didn't really seem to use the piano, that would have been the first thing I sold. The other possessions, that she hung on to, were irrelevant to her life. I suppose it's a person's attempt to hang on their past. But Cherie fought on. She has shown what a strong woman she is, even beating her doctor's prognosis. All thanks to her love of dance! ( )

This book drew me right in with astonishment over the author’s bold choices. I devoured page after page of her adventures in Paris, trying to understand how she went from a Los Angeles housewife—a librarian suddenly widowed when her husband dies young, a mother of two grown sons— to become an American expatriate in Buenos Aires, teaching tango in the embrace of a skilled milonguero, one of the white-haired, elder male aficionados for whom tango is life itself.

I knew from her photograph that she wasn’t a young and flashy dancer, like you might see on TV. She appears nicely aged and traveled, with a smile that beams out from her pictures to answer at least half the question of how she made her way, alone, through worlds of men and dancing that I wouldn’t dream of entering.

I also hoped to learn more about the dark, steamy reality of Argentine tango, born in the brothels, they tell us in the States, an immigrant’s dance of sorrow and longing. I got my wish, but it wasn’t as pretty as I would have liked it to be.

I especially enjoyed the way Magnus tells her story by diving right into the midst of her Parisian adventure. She writes with the skill you’d expect of a librarian, remembering to tell us how things look, smell, and feel. She never hesitates to go further, into her own emotional state, sharing details of her romantic adventures that put me slightly out of my comfort zone at first, and far out of it by the end of the book. But that’s my personal squeamishness. I don’t mean that she wrote X-rated sex scenes; I mean she went places and made choices and paired up with people I never would have, following her need for dancing and companionship across the globe and into clubs and bars and other unseemly settings.

The passion for dancing, the need to have some form of it always a part of her life—that I could relate to. The emotional highs and lows, the willingness to experience physical closeness with strangers—these made me squirm. Perhaps in tribute to her writing skill, she’s conveyed her state of mind so well that I became depressed by the latter chapters, when her adventures in Mexico were at their dreariest. I kept reading, though, hoping she’d explain how she found her current partner in Argentina, which must certainly be her “happily ever after.” Yet she stops just short of that, leaving us in a grimy tango salon, alone among strangers but content to be feeding what has become her addiction.

Do I understand tango better after reading her book? Yes. Could I go where she’s gone? No. Am I glad I read it? Yes, for that very reason of safe, vicarious experience. And I’m happy the author has found her tango dream at last, as the book’s brief prelude indicated. As for how she got to that presumably contented place, her memoir hints that she followed the same path as the immigrants who invented the Church of Tango: loss, hardship, melancholy, and loneliness, but with a spirit that still finds succor in dancing and will never stop.
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