Berls
Written on Jan 7, 2015
**I received this book for free from Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.**
**This book may be unsuitable for people under 17 years of age due to its use of sexual content, drug and alcohol use, and/or violence.**
Oh gosh. This is such a hard review to write because I can't stop thinking about how it ended. And I can't talk to you about that too specifically, since that would be one hell of a spoiler. I think the only thing is to explain how the ending made me feel.
In Astonish Me, Joan (the main character) tries to describe the word "exquisite" to a dancer learning English as a third language. She talks about the perfect beauty of a dancing ballerina, how it's so perfect it's painful. That's the ending of Astonish Me. Its abrupt, but perfectly so, because saying more would ruin the way it hangs with emotion and the poignancy of all it means (and has meant). It's exquisite.
You'd think with how I just described the ending that Astonish Me would be a five star read. But as much as it sucked me in during the last 25%, I struggled to get to that point. The problem with Astonish Me is that you have to be patient. It jumps you around a lot between time periods (ranging from 1970s - 2002ish) and view points. Just when you get committed to one part of the story, you're removed from it and placed in another. Its not until the last 25% that all the threads start to really come together into a clear picture. Once it does, good luck putting it down.
It entertains the whole time though, as long as you're willing to go along for the ride. I grabbed Astonish Me because I love dance and have always been enthralled by the way movement can make a person feel so much. I never dreamed of being a dancer or anything - that was never in this clumsy giant's cards. But the life of a ballet dancer is so mesmerizing, because ballet is so often a cruel lover for dancers. And Astonish Me captured that love, pain, and heartbreak of a life in ballet beautifully.
Maggie Shipstead clearly knows ballet well, because the dances came to life in her words (though I do think knowing ballet terms really helped me appreciate the movement. I don't know what it would be like if you don't know them) and the narrator, Rebecca Lowman, did the words justice, providing the perfect rhythm. The variety of characters provided a challenging set of accents, but I thought Rebecca Lowman pulled them off really well. She did take some getting used to, because she speaks softly and slowly, but after I got used to her and the book, I felt she was a perfect fit.
Astonish Me is about so much more than dance, though. It takes place haphazardly during the late 60s to about 2002. There are two generations of dancers whose lives are tangled together through more than dance, but through life, love, and heartbreak. The characters feel so damn real - I actually want to look up the situations from this book and see how much really happened. It's not described as a biographical fiction, but I believed these characters, with their flaws and insecurities and passions, so intensely it's hard to imagine they aren't out there somewhere.
The author did a really fantastic job weaving in generational moments that appear in your history books and showing the way they impacted these dancers world. The role of the cold war was shocking and exciting, as much as the shock of AIDS was devastating and poignant (sorry to keep using that word, but I can't find another one that works as well for me).
By the end, I felt like Astonish Me had actually been a dance made up of beautiful, disconnected acts, tied together in a shocking, poignant, and a bit devastating way. Not a feel good book, but one that is sure to make any dance lover FEEL the full range of emotions.
