The Ballerinas

by Rachel Kapelke-Dale

[Joni Reads]

I went in to this hearing it was Black Swan meets Dare Me so I was expecting a psychological thriller or at the very least a thriller. Instead I got a genre I can't really name. Is this what literary fiction is because if so then I don't want it.

This book was slow. It was bland and if you're going to classify as a thriller and be marketed by being compared to thrillers then I expect a sense of urgency and I just didn't get it at all.

Delphine as a main character was irritating and just wholly naive and self involved. She left Paris, where she was born, raised, and danced, for St Petersburg, Russia in order to pursue a career as a choreographer. She returns to Paris after over a decade. She lands a job as a choreographer at the ballet company she danced with before she left and she basically tries to make things exactly as they were back then.

Her two best friends Margaux and Lindsay, are also dancers at the same company. They stayed in Paris when she moved and they only stayed in touch through monthly emails. When Delphine comes back she basically expects everything to be the same as it always was and seems shocked and disgruntled to realize that things have changed.
That's not to say that she makes an effort to get to know her friends as they are now. Oh no, she continues to just try to push them back into the little box she wants them in. Even as Margaux continues to just not be interested in really giving her the time of day.
Throughout the book there is mention of something that Delphine and Margaux did to Lindsay when they were younger. Something awful that they feel guilty about. All this mystery and when it was finally revealed what exactly they did I just felt let down. Wow, that's it? All those veiled hints around it and that's all it was. Worse, when Delphine finally confesses to Lindsay about it there was equally no shock.
At first I gave this book three stars because there were some parts when I didn't totally dislike what I was reading but when I sat down to write this review I realized I have nothing good to say about it so I changed it to two stars.
If you are a fan of literary fiction, if you are ballerina, maybe you will like and appreciate this book but as someone who has no dance experience and prefers thrillers this book just wasn't for me.