Hannah Ward has known she wanted to be a ballerina since she was a little girl. But at 19 years old and a member of the prestigious Manhattan Ballet Company, Hannah finds herself constantly practicing, dieting, and exercising, trying to beat out her competition for one of the coveted soloist positions. Dancing is all she knows so what happens when Hannah meets musician Jacob and discovers there’s a world outside of ballet?
First off, the cover of this book completely caught my eye. Second, after reading the synopsis I thought it would be a lot like the movie Center Stage, which I very much like. The character of Hannah is actually a lot like the plotline of Maureen in the movie.
As someone who loves ballet, I found parts of this book particularly interesting. There are a lot of technical descriptions of the inner workings of ballet. As a former ballerina herself, Sophie Flack knows and uses the correct French terms for each step and the novel is peppered with chassés, chaînés, assembles, and fouettés, to name a few. There were some words I recognized and some I didn’t. I could usually get the gist of what was happening but if someone is not familiar with ballet, I could see them perhaps getting lost.
This is a slow character-driven novel. The book mainly portrays real life in the ballet world and there’s not a lot of action or suspense. The ballerinas wake up, go to practice, perform, and go home. Sometimes they go out after a performance but not a lot else happens. It was fascinating to read about the number of pointe shoes each ballerina goes through in one performance or the lengths the ballerinas will go through to keep their slim body type – at one point Hannah has a bra-type garment specifically made to squash her breasts down because she was getting bigger than a training bra.
What I didn’t find so interesting in this book were the actual characters. The characters felt kind of flat to me. It was almost as if the author was so focused on making the ballet seem real that she forgot to make the characters seem real as well. I didn’t really have an attachment to any character.
Still, if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to be a ballerina, you should read this book.
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