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.
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