Dancing with Dynamite, by Tim Huff (Castle Quay Books, 2010)
Dancing with Dynamite is subtitled “celebrating against the odds.” Something we all need to learn sooner or later.
It’s not a feel-good book, but it’s not depressing or painful either. It’s a good-for-you book, introducing real people in hard places and revealing surprising—and thought-provoking—moments of celebration.
It’s an invitation for us to really see the people around us, to see ourselves, and to dare to celebrate no matter what our circumstances.
Tim Huff writes with honesty about individuals he’s met: street people, group home residents, orphans and the aged, and more. The people society tries not to see. Sometimes the deeper story is how they affected his life—and how they can touch ours.
The book shares vignettes of his experiences in ministry to street youth in Toronto, working at a camp for the deaf, and playing Santa for orphans and the elderly in Romania. Although they’re accounts of the poor and marginalized, they’re about the larger human condition.
The author’s goal?
“My prayer is that you’ve found some semblance of yourself within these pages. And in that, that you know you belong. That you are worthy to be celebrated.” (p.163)
Canadian author and speaker Tim Huff has also written Bent Hope: A Street Journal for adults, and the children’s picture book The Cardboard Shack Beneath the Bridge: Helping Children Understand Homelessness, both bestsellers. All three books have won awards (in 2011 Dancing With Dynamite received the Grace Irwin Award, Canada’s largest literary prize for writers who are Christian).