on
3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4.5/5
Pages: 304
Started: 9 April 2024
Finished: 12 April 2024
Summary:
Since she was four and her big brother showed her how beautiful dance could be, Cece has wanted to be a ballerina. Now, at twenty-two, she's the only Black ballerina in the New York City Ballet. Dance is her life, and with every moment of dancing, striving for perfection and emotion and grace, she gets closer to her ultimate dream: to become the first Black female principal dancer at NYCB. Yet although her passion for and commitment to ballet have never wavered, her relationship with her brother has. After watching him struggle for years with addiction, he finally disappeared, and even as Cece navigates the perfection of her dancing and the imperfection of her personal life, she cannot help but feel her brother's absence.
Thoughts:
This was a stunningly beautiful book. Usually tons of technical speech throws me off in a book, but all the ballet words only added to the artistry of this novel. The writing was magical, using punctuation to speed up or slow down sentences at different points. I generally love when books write about art, since it makes the art come alive, and this book made ballet feel beautiful and sweeping and electric and important.
I really enjoyed the complexity of the narrator's thoughts as well. The book wasn't simple, and it didn't necessarily have a moral. Cece chose dance over having a child and didn't regret it, but it was a hard choice that was framed in a way that no one could read as advice. Similarly (and perhaps a bit less helpfully), Cece's struggle with body dysmorphia wasn't entirely condemned, but instead starkly and vulnerably shown in a way without judgement. This fits what I was talking about in my English discussion yesterday: the novel is inherently a dialogism.
The only issue I had with this book was the end. It was so abrupt. I read the last few pages too quickly, because I assumed that they were the set up for the main conflict and I wanted to rush ahead to find out what would happen, but nothing really happened. For so much lead-in and character development, there was no large tension ar the end of the book that made narrative sense. I am glad there wasn't a super clean and tidy end to the book, since that would ruin the nuance that Cuffy maintained so well throughout, but I was still very unsatisfied by how abrupt the ending was. The weirdest part was that the most closure we got came in the form of a single chapter, a few chapters before the end, narrated in the third person omniscient about Cece's brother. It was abrupt and confusing, strangely placed in the book and very strange to be told to the reader but not to Cece.
I really wish this book had ended better, but the writing was so gorgeous that I think it can be forgiven. I definitely plan on re-reading this book again in the future.
Quotes:
"The world was splashing up against him, violent and daunting, and the old urge was screaming at him, the old urge to just take something--just take soething because this is agony you're miserable you don't have to feel this way you could feel nothing at all.
But no. That wasn't better."
Words:
Apogee (n) the point in orbit that is farthest from the center of the earth
Inchoate (adj) just begun and not fully formed (in-koh-et)