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Title details for Girl through Glass by Sari Wilson - Available

Girl through Glass

A Novel

by Sari Wilson
Tavia Gilbert
Audiobook
3 of 3 copies available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
3 of 3 copies available
In the roiling heat of the summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira enters the high-stakes world of New York City ballet, a fiercely competitive world of struggle, obsession, passion for beauty—and something sinister that will challenge her, protect her, and ultimately take her innocence.After her parents' divorce and a childhood spent between her father's tony Upper East Side dwelling and her mother's disordered Brooklyn habitat, young Mira becomes fascinated with the perfectionism, power, and promise of glory that ballet offers. Over the course of four years, she hones her talent, becoming a dancer for Balanchine—one of "Mr. B's girls"—eventually attracting the attention of forty-seven-year-old Maurice, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who haunts the city's dance studios and takes the young girl under his wing. As Mira plunges deeper into the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, isolating her and taking her to darker and darker places within herself.In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and upend the life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self. When she receives a letter from a man she has long thought dead, Kate is hurled back to the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.This enthralling literary debut is told in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, illuminating the costs and privileges of ambition and excellence and whether the sacrifices we make for an ideal destroy us—or save us.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 26, 2016

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781504669153
      • File size: 291324 KB
      • Duration: 10:06:55

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 9, 2015
      Wilson’s debut novel begins in 1977 and centers on Mira Able, an 11-year-old straining to push through the physical and emotional demands of the New York City ballet world. It’s an ambition complicated by her parents’ lack of interest in ballet and unraveling marriage, and further complicated by Maurice, an older, disabled man interested in Mira and her future as a ballerina. Meanwhile, interwoven in alternating chapters is the present-day story of Kate, a dance historian and professor who, after sleeping with a student, is compelled to seek
      closure from her mysterious past in New York. Wilson’s premise and structure could have been disorganized and dull
      in less deft hands, but the story is a uniformly engrossing look into the fabled world of hypercompetitive 1970s ballet. Mira and Maurice’s relationship has the fairy tale feel of Beauty and the Beast, but the pages brim with the realism of the gritty, crime-riddled New York, especially as the plot ricochets toward a surprising, and bittersweet, merging of Kate’s and Mira’s stories. Wilson writes lovingly of ballet and elevates the coming-of-age story with a dark undercurrent about the cost of obsession. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Associates.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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