Saturday, September 18, 2021

The Other Side of Perfect Review

Rating: ★★★★★

Seeing as I am both a former ballet dancer and a former theatre kid (though I'm not much for musicals), I think it was inevitable that this book would grab my attention.

The premise is as follows: Alina was a pre-professional ballet dancer with dreams of joining ABT until she broke her leg. Since she can no longer dance on pointe, she can no longer pursue her ballet dreams, and she's not coping with this very well. She resigns herself to trying out for the school musical to appease her parents and ends up with a new perspective.


From the first couple chapters I was pretty sure that Mariko Turk had either done ballet herself or researched thoroughly and according to her author's note, I was right! She did do ballet. I think her experience allowed her to write Alina with a lot of insight that I myself related to. As the story unfolds it becomes clear that Alina has had an, at best, complicated relationship with her dance teacher, whose biases have lead her to cast Alina and her friend Colleen as the same two roles in the Nutcracker (Chinese Tea and Arabian Coffee) over and over again. I'm white and my dance teacher was white so I didn't have this exact experience, but like many other dancers I did have a fraught relationship with my dance teacher, so the scene where they confront Kira, their teacher, made me tear up a little. I also appreciated how this book tackles racism and racial biases in the performing arts world.

The parts of this book that I was a little less interested in were Alina's friendgroup (Margot, Ethan, and Jude) and to an extent the romance. Jude was cute and all but I was honestly more invested in Alina's relationships with her family, Colleen (who she can't bring herself to talk to because Colleen can still dance), and even Diya, whose talent leads everyone else in the musical to call her "Robobitch" behind her back. Alina's arc of accepting that there were both good and bad things about ballet and her decision to eventually move forward was what made this book stand out to me moreso than Jude liking to knit. Although it is cool that he likes to knit!

Overall I really enjoyed this book and I'd recommend it to dancers and non-dancers alike.

Read other reviews by me on my Goodreads!

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