Nocturnal Book Reviews

1.5/5
I have to warn you straight away that the one thing that drew me to this book was the main thing that made my judgement of Dance of Shadows extremely prejudiced.

I am an ex-dancer myself and although I've never danced en pointe, as my primary was folk dance I still had a full classic ballet education (as you do in Russian choreographic schools), went through few major ballets and was pretty damn good at what I was doing. I still love dance to bits, and that book was an affront to my passion of all things dance.

Vanessa Adler, the main character, is a very talented ballerina but she dances because her mother and her sister did it and she feels obligated to go the same route. When her older sister Margaret disappears after going to study ballet to a prestigious Julliard school in New York, Vanessa decides to go and do the same thing. Yup, she just forever follows people and doesn't want to make something of herself on her own.

Dance of Shadows is very poorly executed, it's awkward, full of wooden token characters and it doesn't make much sense, but above all it doesn't understand dancing, and my major pet peeve of this book is that Vanessa despite her brilliance is indifferent to dancing. Let's not even go into faux pas with ballet terms sequences that did not make any sense, empty theatre when it should be teeming with people after the performance and no emotional nuances of getting into a role for the two main dancers of Firebird...

What?!! She could not possible be brilliant and not love dance. Ballet is a hard graft, it's a huge huge sacrifice, people. You basically can not have ordinary life if you are a ballerina. You can't go home and forget about ballet like you would do with a normal job. You live and breathe by it and you very often marry in the same circle because you literally have no time to meet any outsiders, and if you do - what life can you make with them if you are always on the road and they are not?

Saying that she does not care about ballet is unbelievable. You don't work that hard and get that far if you are indifferent to dance, you have to be truly passionate about it.

So this was my first and worst problem with this book.

Secondly, the effing plot didn't make any sense and was very sketchy. What is wrong with Stravinsky and Firebird? I happen to love this composer and this ballet and I do not find anything demonic and strange in his music.


Also all this people were disappearing from Julliard and nobody was making a fuss?!! Right. Like that is going to happen.

Thirdly, Josef was a piss poor choreographer, and I would not for one moment believe that he could work in one of the best ballet schools in the world. Screaming and insulting someone? Yeah, sure, some of them do that. But absurdly accusing someone of ineptitude when they don't know the dance steps and never seen it in their life? That's just plain crazy.

Forth, where is the rest of the school? The rest of the studies? Teachers? Living in general? Are we supposed to believe that apart from Josef and his flankie ballet teacher everyone else blends into shadows? That nothing else happens?

Basically, I have to stop my rant now because the deeper you dig into this book, the worse it gets. I'm sure lots of people will find it entertaining, but from my perspective I do not recommend it to anyone.