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cynsfictionaddiction 's review for:
The Ballerinas
by Rachel Kapelke-Dale
As a millenial, I have to admit I loved Center Stage. And Save The Last Dance. And Step Up. And Black Swan. It seems we could not get enough of those dance-centered teen rom-coms, so when I came across The Ballerinas, it struck me as a little nostalgia-meet-psychological thriller and I knew I wanted to read it. Thanks so much to St. Martin’s Press for the advanced reader’s copy!
The Ballerinas is told from the main character Delphine’s point of view, flipping back and forth from present-day 2018 to her past at the Paris Opera Ballet (POB) starting in 1995. Delphine considered herself a musketeer of a sort with her two best friends, Margeaux and Lindsay, but after causing a tragic incident, Delphine runs off to St. Petersburg to choreograph ballets for her new boyfriend. When Delphine finally returns to Paris in 2018, she is forced to face her past and the aftermath of her decisions.
I had some mixed feelings about this book. For starters, it was a bit slow and I never really got into it. It was promoted as a psychological thriller and there was a ton of foreshadowing in the first half of the book about what the “tragic incident” was, but when I finally found out what happened, it was anti-climatic.
All three of the girls were self-absorbed and selfish, making them difficult to relate to or even feel bad for. While I didn’t necessarily love this novel, I do think it addressed some really important, serious situations and themes of female empowerment, sexual harassment and assault, and even motherhood and family. These topics were what kept me engaged in the end and I love that these conversations are becoming so much more open and prominent.
The Ballerinas is told from the main character Delphine’s point of view, flipping back and forth from present-day 2018 to her past at the Paris Opera Ballet (POB) starting in 1995. Delphine considered herself a musketeer of a sort with her two best friends, Margeaux and Lindsay, but after causing a tragic incident, Delphine runs off to St. Petersburg to choreograph ballets for her new boyfriend. When Delphine finally returns to Paris in 2018, she is forced to face her past and the aftermath of her decisions.
I had some mixed feelings about this book. For starters, it was a bit slow and I never really got into it. It was promoted as a psychological thriller and there was a ton of foreshadowing in the first half of the book about what the “tragic incident” was, but when I finally found out what happened, it was anti-climatic.
All three of the girls were self-absorbed and selfish, making them difficult to relate to or even feel bad for. While I didn’t necessarily love this novel, I do think it addressed some really important, serious situations and themes of female empowerment, sexual harassment and assault, and even motherhood and family. These topics were what kept me engaged in the end and I love that these conversations are becoming so much more open and prominent.