OTHER STAGES

In 2008, Katrina Devries and Javier Torres, both performers with San Francisco’s West Coast Ballet Theatre, have sex as friends, not lovers, and have a son, Dario, together. A few years later, Javier announces that he’s moving out of their shared house to the other side of the city to live with his lover, Brent. He also makes major changes to the dance company’s upcoming gala: He will now partner with a younger female dancer, and Katrina will be part of another dance, to be created by a disturbingly nasty guest male choreographer. Katrina leans on the support of her friends, including April Manning, a former dancer who’s now a ballet master and the sole woman in the company’s leadership. The arrival of David Lavigne, a personable piano accompanist, also disrupts the company’s dynamics. April’s 14-year-old daughter, Kylie Garvey, who loves classical music and feels like an outcast in her high school, develops a crush on David, while he yearns to break through Katrina’s reserve. Then Kylie commits a frightening act that tears Katrina and April apart. Will they be able to move past their problems to transform the company’s gala? In this fourth book in Rose’s Ballet Theatre Chronicles, she skillfully continues to explore the sometimes-obsessive personalities and preoccupations of the members of her lively, fictional dance company. For example, April, the protagonist of her previous entry, Ballet Orphans (2021), makes an observation at one point that shows the difficulty she has seeing beyond her chosen profession: She ruefully notes that her “non-dancing daughter,” Kylie, has “the foot type all ballet dancers coveted.” Katrina, the lead character here, is also the most intriguing; Rose crafts a lovely backstory that effectively shows how Katrina is empowered by tapping into a dance art—belly dancing—that she first experienced and loved as a child.