From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I really need to quit reading stories where the description has it that this novel is "Story X meets Story Y," where X and Y are well-known novels or movies. Rather than represent the best of the referenced stories they're supposed to mash-up, such books as this always seem to exemplify the worst of them.
Unfortunately this one is in first person which is worst person for the most part. I do not like first person stories because they're far too "me me me." If you get a good author and a decent main character narrating, it can work, but this main character, Delphine, was not a nice person and she was completely unlikeable. It became ever harder to listen to her whiny voice and endless self-absorption which is only one reason why I DNF'd this.
The fact that Delphine smoked didn't help. I have an aversion to characters who smoke, and it seems like a bad idea to have your character be a ballet dancer and smoke. That's not to say that no ballet dancer ever smoked (or had any other bad habits), but I think an author needs to ask questions like: "what are we promoting here?" and "do I really want my readers to detest her?" I'm not sure the author considered those questions in imbuing Delphine with the traits she has, while simultaneously trying to have it that she was who she was.
Quite honestly, I don't really like to watch ballet performances, but I do appreciate the work the dancers do and the sacrifices they make, so maybe that's why I like a good ballet story, or documentary of which I have read and seen many. This one isn't such a story.
On a point of order (or maybe en pointe of order!) let's take that term - dancers - for example. Despite the novel's title, the term 'ballerina' is traditionally one that is reserved, in ballet, for exceptional performers, and the title étoile for a real star. None of the three main characters in this novel, Delphine, Lindsay, and Margaux (who may as well not be in it for all she contributes) is a ballerina much less an étoile. They are danseuses, which admittedly would not make for such an appealing title.
These three dancers are at the Paris Opera Ballet School, although for all that counts in the story, they could be ballet dancers anywhere, really. This never really felt like a French novel, and I was kicked out of suspension of disbelief more than once, for example when at one point the author tells us "There's no real word for creepy in French" (try glauque).
This kind of thing wasn't helped by the body-shaming employed at least at one place (I DNF'd this novel so I can't speak for all of it) when I read, "A ballerina is a perfect woman. Thin. Beautiful. Invisibly strong." I agree with the third item, but thin and beautiful are abusive and were completely unnecessary. Again, this story is in first person, so this was Delphine making this observation, but it spoke badly of her as a person and turned me off her even more than I already was. Yes, there are thin ballet dancers, but how they get that way is a whole other story that's barely touched on here, where all danseuses seem to be cookie-cutter clones of one another with no room for personality or individuality.
There was also a confused section which read "This one looked like it was from the early 19'60s:" where it seems like the author had written '60's and then added the century and forgot to remove the apostrophe. A minute problem, but still one more problem. Maybe that will be fixed in the final copy.
On top of all of this were the endless flashbacks in the story. I'm not a fan of flashbacks, especially not extensive ones, and even more especially not when these diversions didn't really have divisions from the current story - certainly not by chapter - nor were they truly separate as entities since the flashbacks were imbued with the present day perspective, and the present day sometimes had Delphine recalling significant things from the past. It became, at times, hard to remember where we were in time, and this only served to dissolve the story into an ungodly and tiresome mess.
It's one thing to tease a mystery from the past, but when it's teased out over scores of muddled pages of sometimes tedious text, that's just irritating to a reader. I made it through fifty percent of this and we were no nearer at all to getting even an inkling of what this big faux pas was. That's when I gave up, during yet another uninformative story-halting flashback, and I said the hell with it! At that point, I was so frustrated with the story that I really didn't care anymore what happened or who it happened to, or how much it hurt. I'm done with this! It was that bad.
If this novel had been more concise, had focused more on ballet and less on trivial drama, and had told a better story instead of mindlessly meandering and holding up a tease that was probably only going to be a disappointing letdown anyway, I would have been onboard with it, but as it is, I can't commend it as a worthy read. It was time to jeté-son it and move allongé to something more divertissement.
