Variation is a tough book to review. On one hand, I found myself putting aside things that I needed to get done in order to keep reading it, but on the other, I found the frequent “surprise” reveals in the plot to be so frequent that sometimes they felt silly.
This book starts off as a forbidden summer romance. The four Rousseau sisters vacation at their family summer house in Haven Cove every year, but are distant from the locals. Their mother was a legendary ballerina and is training her daughters to follow in her footsteps, which means they don’t have time to date, much less date a “townie.” Hudson Ellie is training to be a Coast Guard rescue swimmer when he saves Allie Rosseau and one of her sisters from a leaky boat.
Hudson and Allie remain friends and are on the verge of more when Allie’s oldest sister, Lina, dies in a tragic car accident at the end of summer. Jarred, Allie and Hudson move on, chasing their respective dreams.
Years later Allie is a principal dancer at the Metropolitan Ballet Company and Hudson is a Coast Guard rescue swimmer based off Cape Cod. Allie ruptures her Achilles tendon and returns to Haven Cove for the summer to rehab it, fearful that she’ll never dance professionally again.
Hudson and Allie are reunited because Hudson’s ten-year-old niece, Juniper, is obsessed with ballet and insists on meeting Allie. Juniper is adopted and with all the preciousness of a plot moppet has taken a DNA test to find her birth parents (which she’s not supposed to do until she’s 18) and
…discovers Allie is her aunt (the late Lina being her mom). No one knew Lina was pregnant or had a child so this is a big shock.
Juniper’s adoptive mom also hates the Rousseau girls for being snobby (they kind of are), so Allie, Juniper and Hudson hatch a scheme. Hudson and Allie will pretend to date again to get Juniper’s mom to see the Rousseau’s aren’t that bad (except they kinda are) and then tell her what they learned from the paternity test.
This idea sounds great…if you’re a ten-year-old. As an adult I was like “This is the best solution you have?”
Obviously Hudson and Allie start to develop real feelings for each other, which is complicated because of their respective careers.
I think the reason I read this book compulsively was I was fascinated with Allie and Hudson’s jobs. There is a lot of detail on what it takes to be a prima ballerina in an incredibly small and competitive world and I was hooked on the ballet stuff. I want more ballet drama. True story, I took ballet lessons as a little kid and quit the day I realized you could see the pattern of my Care Bear undies through my pink leotard.
Hudson’s job is also really, really interesting and I wish we would have gotten more scenes with him at work.
The conflict related to their professions makes total sense to me. First of all, they can’t really co-locate because Hudson is going to be stationed wherever the Coast Guard needs him. Allie is headed back to the Met and even if she wasn’t, it’s not like a lot of places have openings for principal ballet dancers.
They are both also incredibly driven which makes sense based on what they do. They have to snatch moments of time in between Hudson being called into emergencies and Allie’s grueling training regimen. Honestly, I think this would have been plenty of conflict without the adoption-family-drama.
What worked less for me were all the sudden reveals in this book:
reveals about the Rousseau family, about Lina, about teenage Hudson…. It felt like everyone had some secret that had to be dramatically unveiled at some point.
The result was the plot tension was kind of up-down-up-down and made me feel a little seasick. Everyone in this book could have helped themselves a lot by just talking to each other.
I think a lot of readers looking for high emotion or high drama romance will like that up-down feeling, though. It just wasn’t for me, in part because of the uneven tension, and because I think some of the plot twists were a little over the top. That said, I was enthralled by the detailed professional lives of the characters, and it left me searching for more ballet-related romance fiction.
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Since you enjoyed the dance aspects of this book, I’d like to recommend The Striker by Ana Huang. The FMC is a ballerina whose career is disrupted by injuries suffered in a car accident. When the novel opens, she is teaching in a prestigious dance academy and dealing with chronic pain. Her brother is the captain of a professional football (soccer) club, and he and his much-hated teammate are condemned by their coach to ballet-based fitness training together during the off-season. Needless-to-say, the chemistry between the despised teammate and the ballet instructor is immediate and intense.
What I liked about this book was that it was emotional without succumbing to excessive drama. Neither of the protagonists is perfect; they have real flaws and make real mistakes, but most of the time, they cope like adults. The romance is set against a detailed and well realized background of both ballet and English football. I’d like to note that the book is longer than the average contemporary romance, but the pacing worked for me, and I enjoyed spending time with these characters in their world.
Did you find yourself wondering when the dragons would show up? I ask because a lot of people only know Yarros for Fourth Wing. When I started reading Kelley Armstrong’s Rockton series it took me a couple chapters to get my head around no one sprouting fur and fangs because everything else I’d read by her had fur and fangs.
Great review!