All you really need to do to get me to give a contemporary a shot is put some pointe shoes on the cover.
Casey Alexander was a ballerina in New York, but after an injury ends her career, she goes home to her small hometown of Angel Falls, Alabama, to take over the local ballet school. Back in that hometown is her former best friend Melody, who is married to Casey’s former high school boyfriend Ben (these facts are related), but also the new owner of the local newspaper, a Scottish dude named Ian. When Melody dies in a car accident, the question of “new hotness” and “old flame” raises its head.
I liked the ballet stuff, but some of it is kind of perfunctory. Casey has already coped with the disappointment of no longer being able to dance professionally, so she’s already resigned to her new life. She doesn’t need to get students, either: there’s a closing school that she just takes over, more or less. But the descriptions of classes and how Casey adjusts her teaching technique from the preschoolers to the advanced students is well done.
So one issue is that this is written in first person from Casey’s point of view. I don’t have the knee jerk “DO NOT WANT” that I know a lot of people have – it’s a tool like any other. I do think that it doesn’t work as well in Romance because it makes it difficult to develop the two main characters equally. I know a lot about what makes Casey work. Ian is still pretty much a cypher. I know a bit about his history, but not much about his motivations. Who is he, besides a Scot with a tragic backstory? I honestly don’t know. I think first person can work, but a lot of attention and work needs to be done to make sure both people get enough development and attention, and it wasn’t done here.
The bigger issue, though, is how trauma is handled.
No one should have to cope with that alone! No one!
Even beyond all of that, Casey is a doormat. She knows she’s a doormat. She keeps thinking, “God, I’m being a doormat not saying no when Ben keeps asking me to interrupt my life because he can’t be arsed to pick the kids up” but she never does anything. Knowing what you’re doing wrong and figuring out how to stop it are different tools. Again, I suggest therapy. Come on, girl! You made it in an NYC ballet company! You refurbished your dance studio with your bare hands! You can stand up to this guy and to the ghost of your friend. Really.
Nor is there any mention of getting Melody’s three kids into therapy. The youngest is in pre-school, and NO ONE explains to her that her mother is dead. She keeps saying, “When Mommy comes home…” and no one sits her down with the Sesame Street episode when Mr. Hooper dies to explain what happened. And Ben, Melody’s husband? He just shunts all the responsibility for the kids on Casey and Melody’s parents and everyone is like “Well, he’ll figure out how to cook and shit eventually or something.” Like, GET A BLUE APRON SUBSCRIPTION, DUDE. AND SOME THERAPY FOR YOURSELF.
Everyone in this family could use some support. This town is clearly fucked up enough to support a couple of counselors, and they could make BANK.
Yeah, I think I scared my neighbors last night when I was yelling, “OH MY GOD GET YOU SOME THERAPY” but really the biggest structural problem is Ian. I don’t know what makes him tick. He has an affinity for black linen shirts, uses the word “lass” a lot, and has a huge dick. He runs newspapers, but isn’t a journalist. I’m not entirely certain what Casey sees in him except that he’s hot and wants to get with her. And he likes her dog. I mean, that’s important; I don’t want to discount the importance of “I like you, you like my dog.” I just need more about his inner life. Who are you, dude? WHO ARE YOU?
This is the first book in a series about the town of Angel Falls, and I see some potential continuing through-lines about specific places, but I have no idea who the other books might be about (although I suspect that Ben is an option – the tragic widower who can barely cook and his three adorable children? Who can resist?).
There’s a lot of potential in this series and in the characters, but there needs to be a lot more development and consistency. I get why people write in first person, but when a hero and a heroine need to be developed, first person REALLY needs to work hard. REALLY hard. And it didn’t work so well here.
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Reasons I began skipping sections/almost entire books:
1. Characters possessing no common sense whatsoever
2. Refusing to use words/have basic conversations
3. Too many anachronisms
4. Refusing to stand up for oneself/lack of character development
5. Lack of necessary self-care, ie therapy
There were others, but those were the main ones. Whenever some or all of the above appears, I skip to the last 30 or so pages and read those. Can’t begin to list the number of books where I’ve “read” the first 30-60 pages then skipped to the last 30. No regrets, either.
Not only would this have been another skipper to me, I don’t think I’d have made it past the first 50 pages. How you persevered to finish this, I don’t know, but thank you for your efforts. Definitely took one for the team. Seriously, kudos.
I’m still upset about Mr Hooper.
That dog clearly doesn’t think much of the book either.
I feel sorry for the fictional characters (Melody and children) being victims of a plot device. I guess the option of Ben considering divorce to be with Casey, or there being an adult conflict without someone dying is too realistic. I also side-eye any father of three that wont attempt to handle the household by himself (e.g. Ben sounds like a douche) and doesn’t seem to grieve at all apart from losing his ‘housekeeper’.
Question: Are there contemporaries where heroine and hero hightail it out of their dysfunctional small towns at the end?
@Mona: Only vintage YA movies spring to mind…and also, for the moment the characters are limited to planning to “hightail it out of their dysfunctional small town”:
Show Me Love (original Swedish title: F—-ing Åmål) (1998);
Australian Rules (2002).
@Mona I would read a contemporary where the heroine and hero hightail it out of their dysfunctional small towns at the end. Someone needs to write this.
The latest and greatest fiction I’ve seen on escaping toxic patterns was the arc in chapters 102-114 of “March Comes in Like A Lion”. The dad is far more obviously errant – narcissistic personality disorder in full bloom – but also plays on sympathies like a virtuoso. He gets an epic takedown in the manga. Very emotionally satisfying.
(Dunno if the (second) movie will live up to that yet.)
Re geography. The locals in the close-knit Tokyo quarter did sweet small-town type things – like subbing in at a character’s business during a health crisis – without turning into enablers at all.
@Mona – maybe the happy ending is that Ian takes Casey back to Scotland where she can get free healthcare in spite of her pre-existing injury? (Seriously, is Casey at all disabled by this injury? Do people even know the extent of injuries through which most ballet dancers will dance? Leaving unionized employment in a world center for sports and dance medicine in a state with – by US standards – generous medicaid and strict labor laws to become self-employed in a state that opted out of ACA and a small town where the nearest hospital may be an hour’s drive away and probably has NO specialists in dance medicine does not strike me as sane self-care for a woman with a possibly long term injury.)
@Zyva: I have been to Åmål! It’s cute and all, but YEAH it’s very small.
[trigger warnings]
@Redheadedgirl: ‘small’ = higher rates of narrow-mindedness = higher suicide rates for LGBTQ characters like those in the movie.
@Redheadedgirl. PS, if you want ballet, “The Million Dollar Question” by Kimberly Lang. 100%.
I did NOT want ballet, but I still bought Lang’s dynamic – and sizzling – descriptions.
(Money stuff…more uncomfortable.)
“LGBTQ people, like the characters in the movie”, it should be. Leapfrog editing = fail.
Ballet and Scotsmen? Catnip! So glad I did not see this book before the review because all of the above would have enraged me.
Ugh, why is it Casey’s responsibility to take care of the kids? Ben is their father and he is right there!
@Zyva – yes, and small towns are often really crappy for people who don’t fit the local norm in all kinds of ways. If you don’t fit in with the dominant social circle, there may not be much of an alternative. This is especially true for kids in small schools – if they can’t be friends with the few kids in their class, they might have no friends at all, and they can’t escape. Whenever I hear someone go on about how it’s so much better to raise children in the country I want to scream. Maybe it’s great… if the kids get lucky.
(I speak from experience.)
@ Althea Claire Duffy
Yeah…They make those kind of caviling excuses about the lack of housing affordability in urban areas of my country – “go live in the country”. Sure, where jobs are scarce and bigots are plenty. She’ll be right, eh?
The only place I’ve seen serious sociology on country living – including on the subgroup who suffer through it (“experience it as exile”, I think was the phrase) – was in the French science popularisation magazine Sciences Humaines.
This is something of a tangent, but does anyone know of a book featuring ballet dancers that doesn’t end with someone’s career over due to injury? I love ballet and I totally want to read about ballet dancers, but I don’t particularly want to read about ballet dancers struggling with their new lives as non-ballet dancers (I mean, I’m not opposed, but I’m no more interested than I would be in people with other career types). There have been some good romances involving active ice skaters, so why not ballet dancers too?
The only book I can think of where someone’s ballet career wasn’t finished due to injury was this Harlequin Blaze that starts with her in rehab for an injury that doesn’t exactly finish her career, but she still basically ends up retiring anyway.
It’s not the tangent least travelled today: “The Million Dollar Question” by Kimberly Lang.
No injury. I don’t remember if the epilogue had the heroine past typical ballerina retirement age. I think not. I think it was a ‘visit mum at work’ married-with-kid epilogue ending, but I’m not sure.
@ Althea Claire Duffy
My parents had small-town experiences like you describe, though to varying degrees. My experience is more made up of dramatic contrasts, and included the benefit of grace periods before and between narrowing options and loss of flexibility.
I am sorrowful that you have direct knowledge of these dynamics.
(Sure you could have understood and empathised from a safe distance instead, no worries.)
@anonymous, Nora Roberts has one. Dance of Dreams, I think? Anyway, the H/h are both ballet dancers in the same company, and no one retires.
I don’t understand why she’s wearing pointe shoes with that dress. Those two things don’t go together.
@Anonymous – Non-fiction and sadly out of print, but Melissa Hayden’s book “Offstage and On” alternates the summaries of the stories she told herself about the ballet roles she danced with stories about her life as a principal ballerina. Not a romance per se, but as I recall she fought pretty hard to keep her career after marrying and (even worse) having children. Her (very supportive) husband and son weave in and out of the stories, and she clearly loved both them and her dancing – and she danced with Balanchine until she was fifty! A smart woman, and a beautiful dancer. Worth reading.
@MsCellanie
I don’t understand why she’s wearing pointe shoes with that dress.
I don’t understand why she’s wearing pointe shoes at all. What kind of injury prevents a person from dancing professionally, while leaving her ability to go on point unimpaired? And if she can’t go on point, what’s she doing in the shoes?
As I recall, her injury was a sprained ankle (I know) and sure, it’s totally possible to be able to dance on pointe for short stretches, but not have the physical capability to keep up the demands of a professional dance career anymore. So that part makes sense, even if the injury is a little hand-wavey.
And the pointe shoes are on the cover to get me to read it. Obviously.
I did just order a copy of Off Stage and On, so thank you, Rebecca!
Sprained ankle wouldn’t end a dance career. I haven’t read Melissa Hayden’s book. Want to now. Studied with her on scholarship in NY. She was a firecracker. She started ballet late. Didn’t have the traditional Balanchine body. Didn’t matter. Made it to Prima Ballerina. Fierce. Totally unique.
@Redheadedgirl – Hope you like the Hayden book! I’d love to read your review!
@Sara – Wow, lucky you! That must have been an amazing experience. I’ve ranted before about the way ballet dancers are portrayed, but I think that’s just an extension of what some people earlier were saying about not reading about jobs you know. (Not that I ever got as far as you did in ballet, but I did grow up around dancers.) But scientists, professors, physical therapists, and pretty much any other profession doesn’t come off much better.
It was. Feels almost like a dream. Another person, that it all happened to.
The movie Turning Point depicted the world pretty well. I went to that movie seven times. Made my husband and son sit through it decades later. They were polite, but bored. It was magic when it came out, but even to me it suddenly seemed very dated. I wished I had kept the memory of its splendidness rather than trying to recapture the feeling I had watching it at 16.
So, I was reading this review and telling my son about it and mentioned what happened in the spoiler and he said ‘No, thats just wrong. You don’t DO that thing in that situation.’ He’s 17 with a first aid certificate. He’s fairly certain that doing That Thing in That Situation will give the opposite to the desired result.