I love ballet stories. I have eight of the 11 Drina books, including two of the really hard to get ones. I have all of the Royal Ballet School diaries, and a bunch of the Satin Slippers series from the 80s (and oh, is it 80s. It’s so bad and the main heroine is so stupid). Center Stage is one of my favorite movies, and I highly suggest going to see simulcasts of the Royal Ballet in movie theaters when you get a chance.

So when I was at the We Need Diverse Books panel at RT, and two of the authors were Sona and Dhonelle and they were talking about their book which was set in an elite ballet school and there were three main leads and it, among other things, explored how their ethnicity affected their experience and I was like I NEED IT RIGHT NOW. I was lucky enough to get a signed copy from Avon later that afternoon, and devoured it before I even got home.

The setting is the American Ballet Conservatory, which feeds into the American Ballet Company. It’s make it or break it time- do well, and you might get a spot in the company, if the director thinks you’re good enough, if your body holds out, and if you are very very lucky.

The three leads are Gigi, a black girl from California who just started, and Bette, a white girl from New York, who is a legacy student: her grandmother danced with the company and her older sister was one of the shining stars six years earlier and is in the company now. Plus, there’s June, a half-Korean girl who’s been at the conservatory forever, but feels like she’s part of the woodwork.

They each have their own challenges- June doesn’t know who her father is, and her mother is super intense, demanding that if June isn’t getting lead roles in the student performances, then she’ll need to leave the school. She also doesn’t know much Korean, and the other Korean students have banded against her.

Gigi is new, and super talented, and an outsider in terms of geography, regional culture, and race. She doesn’t get the cutthroat culture, or why no one wants to be her friend. Many of the other girls have been there forever, and then Gigi swans in and takes the good roles and gets the good attention but she also has a heart condition. Dancing could kill her.

Bette, though. Bette has been secure in her position as the queen of her age group based on the strength of her last name and her alpha bitch-ness. But she’s starting to plateau, and her mother is a drunk who isn’t interested in parenting, just in having little genetic resume boosters.

One of the things we talked about in the We Need Diverse Books panel was that some facets of making your book’s world more diverse is just making the characters not default to white. There are aspects of Gigi, June, and Bette that don’t default to their repective races. They are all working for the same goal. They go to the same classes and are trying to learn the same techniques.

 

However, there is also the challenge of making your characters authentic in their experiences, and this is where Charaipotra and Clayton shine. Gigi is black, but she’s not, and some of her classmates assume she’s from the ghetto (“I’ve never been to the ghetto!”) but there’s still the issue of her tights needing to be dyed a different color than the white girls’. The food is different for her, and her family doesn’t act like the other girls’ families. When she loses her shit, there’s the worry that she’ll just be seen as a Angry Black Girl, not as someone who has legitamate things to be upset about (and oh, she does).

June struggles with the fact that she is only half-Korean, and while she was raised by her mother, her mother blames her for being what she was brought up to be. Who among us hasn’t been faced with parent disappointment for being exactly what they molded us into?She doesn’t know much Korean (but her mother didn’t teach her), she’s got an eating disorder modeled on her mother’s.  Being alienated from her culture while it swarms around her, not touching her, is June’s unique problem in her life, and it’s heartbreaking.

Bette is a total sociopath, but the way she tells her story, you almost think there never was a chance for her to be anything else. Her mother is determined that she’ll have two professional ballerina daughters, no matter what the cost is to them. Her mother is a narcissist with no empathy, so it’s no wonder that Bette is the same. She never had a chance and the book has a lot of empathy for her, even as it condemns what she does. That’s a neat trick, and not easy to do.

The cover copy describes this as Black Swan meets Pretty Little Liars. The melodrama factor is high. There’s harassment that escalates to attempted murder, maimings, vandalism, and HIPPA violations. The end was, the more I think about it, the most satisfying unsatisfying ending imaginable, and I am SUPER glad that I went to the WNDB panel, and that I snagged a copy. I’m really excited to see what else these two write, separately or together.

One of the reasons we need diverse books is because “we need windows and mirrors.” The Mirror, to see ourselves reflected in fiction. I see myself reflected all the time- other people who are not white, cis, straight, Christian, do not.   Everyone deserves to see stories that represent them. But we also need Windows, to see stories about people who are not like ourselves. It teaches empathy, and that the world isn’t the way our stories often portray it. Because of the structure, this book can be both mirror and window, and that’s important.