A performance accident leaves a ballet soloist fighting for her career and her life.
This follow-up to Rose’s first installment of the Ballet Theatre Chronicles (Off Balance, 2015) finds the author once again tackling a dancecentric family drama, this time spotlighting the bond between two sisters. Dena Lindgren is shocked to find herself promoted to soloist ahead of her older sister, Rebecca, by Anders Gunst, the omniscient and imperious director of the West Coast Ballet Theatre. “You lack your sister’s looks,” the always-sensitive Anders tells her, “but it’s that very omission that makes you a more interesting dancer to watch.” Of course, this makes her relationship with Rebecca tense, but there’s something else throwing her life off course, “a nameless, fuzzy disequilibrium” that seems to be causing slight deafness and, during a performance of Spirit Hour, causes her to trip and fall. Twice. Doctors confirm it: there’s a tumor locked onto her vestibulocochlear nerve, and it’s going to bring her career to a halt. Meanwhile, both sisters wrestle with surprising romances; social media brings some of the ballet world’s dark secrets to light; and readers finds themselves caught up in the way a close group of dancers can descend into “high school-level cattiness all over again.” Rose is marvelous at subverting her readers’ expectations: at first, they expect Rebecca to be unsympathetic and opportunistic, but she’s far more complex than that. In alternating chapters, readers learn as much about one sister as they do the other. And the siblings aren’t the only two fully rounded characters. Their father, Conrad; the loyal Lana; the whistleblower Tatum; and much of the company are brought believably and even poignantly to life. The quiet beauty of the prose rarely calls attention to itself but carries the reader smoothly through the tale with no bumps in the road (“It all starts and ends with the artistic director. Casting in ballets. Daily rehearsal schedules. Careers. One word from him, an index finger raised, a frown creasing his brow, could change everything”). And the glossary of dance terms at the end of the book proves a marvelous resource for the uninitiated. This is a novel both for ballet lovers and those new to the art. A lovely and engaging tale of sibling rivalry in the high-stakes dance world.
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9860934-3-2
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Classical Girl Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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