![]() ![]() First Love (also released as The Sleeping Beauty), Adrienne Sharp.The Painted Girls, Cathy Marie Buchanan.White Swan, Black Swan: Stories, Adrienne Sharp.The True Memoirs of Little K: A Novel, Adrienne Sharp. ![]() Without further ado, here are The Classical Girl’s favorite and recommended ballet novels (and one short story collection), in no particular order: The craft, and the scars the lifetime commitment has yielded, have made these characters who they are. The thing connecting these ten books is that all the narrators are dancers at their core. Likewise, Girl Through Glass features one narrator (of two) who is a dance historian and professor, steering clear of the dance performance world in a way of avoiding her own dark past within it. The Art of Falling uses flashback to reference the narrator’s actual performing days, and chronicles instead her slow, treacherous journey to finding wholeness beyond her lifelong relationship with dance, its dark hold, the mix of slavish love and despair its presence conjured. In Outside the Limelight, one ballet dancer narrator spends nearly the whole story offstage, in doctors’ offices, out in the “real” world with new non-dancer friends and ideas. While I’m calling it ballet fiction, it doesn’t mean it has to take place in a ballet studio or theater (or necessarily be classical ballet, for that matter). I should clarify something about this Top 10 list. And suddenly I wasn’t the only adult wanting to read ballet fiction. The equally compelling documentaries, First Position and Ballerina happened. ![]() What can I say? I love the ballet world’s theatricality and glamour, its dangerous, seductive glitter, and ballet fiction for adults just didn’t exist. I compensated for its lack of competition by reading it over and over, annually, through my youth and adolescence, until the trashy romantic fiction genre caught my eye and stole my attention for well over a decade. Noel Streatfeild’s more substantial and highly popular Ballet Shoes comprised my ballet fiction-reading youth. Just click on their titles! photo by Jordan Matterįor a long time, “ballet fiction” meant the books that catered to young girls, slim tomes with pink, appealing covers. Interested in my dance-related fiction? Check out the Ballet Theatre Chronicles ( Off Balance, Outside the Limelight, Ballet Orphans) and the curiously connected A Dancer’s Guide to Africa. ![]()
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