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This is a book review; I haven’t seen the TV series, but I gather it’s quite different.
Bunheads is a YA novel about Hannah, a 19-year-old dancer in a huge New York ballet company. She went off to study at the Manhattan Ballet Academy when she was very young, and so ballet has been her entire life.
It begins when she’s getting frustrated with not having a life, partly due to meeting a quirky musician whose name I have already forgotten. Will she quit ballet, get a life, and stay with Quirky McWhatsisface? Or will she continue her obsessive routine and maybe become a star at the cost of misery and probable anorexia, with her shallow rich boyfriend who loves ballet and never makes any demands on her that would interfere with her career?
I could spoiler-cut and tell you, but duh. Is it not totally obvious?
Flack was also a professional ballet dancer, and I wanted to read this book because I was interested in what I assumed would be realistic, vivid detail. It may be realistic, but it’s not very vivid. The characters are one-dimensional. You never get a sense of why Hannah loved ballet in the first place.
It was also frustrating to read a book in which, even though it’s textually justified as due to individual circumstances, the right decision for the heroine is to dump the man who actually supports her career, go with the man who doesn’t, and quit her career. It would have had fewer unintended implications if Hannah had any idea what she wanted to do with her life, so it read more as a career change than a career drop. But she doesn’t. This is part of having no personality. Which, again, is explicit in the text – she has no life but ballet, so she thinks of nothing but ballet – but the way she thinks of ballet is unrevealing of both herself and ballet.
Rumer Godden’s Thursday's Children
is a way better take on a ballet-obsessed character. So is Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (The Shoe Books)
.
Bunheads
Girl in Motion
looks like it might be good, or at least better – has anyone read it?
Bunheads is a YA novel about Hannah, a 19-year-old dancer in a huge New York ballet company. She went off to study at the Manhattan Ballet Academy when she was very young, and so ballet has been her entire life.
It begins when she’s getting frustrated with not having a life, partly due to meeting a quirky musician whose name I have already forgotten. Will she quit ballet, get a life, and stay with Quirky McWhatsisface? Or will she continue her obsessive routine and maybe become a star at the cost of misery and probable anorexia, with her shallow rich boyfriend who loves ballet and never makes any demands on her that would interfere with her career?
I could spoiler-cut and tell you, but duh. Is it not totally obvious?
Flack was also a professional ballet dancer, and I wanted to read this book because I was interested in what I assumed would be realistic, vivid detail. It may be realistic, but it’s not very vivid. The characters are one-dimensional. You never get a sense of why Hannah loved ballet in the first place.
It was also frustrating to read a book in which, even though it’s textually justified as due to individual circumstances, the right decision for the heroine is to dump the man who actually supports her career, go with the man who doesn’t, and quit her career. It would have had fewer unintended implications if Hannah had any idea what she wanted to do with her life, so it read more as a career change than a career drop. But she doesn’t. This is part of having no personality. Which, again, is explicit in the text – she has no life but ballet, so she thinks of nothing but ballet – but the way she thinks of ballet is unrevealing of both herself and ballet.
Rumer Godden’s Thursday's Children
is a way better take on a ballet-obsessed character. So is Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (The Shoe Books).Bunheads
Girl in Motion
looks like it might be good, or at least better – has anyone read it?![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Otherwise, I do think Thursday's Children is great.
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Quirky McWhatshisface also didn't seem that important in Hannah's life. He represented doing stuff other than dancing, but I thought he was clearly not a long-haul guy. The only characters with any interest were the other dancers, especially the friend who points out that Hannah has never been as single focus as she would need to be. And the arch rival who is that dedicated.
In Quirky's defense, I do think it is healthy for young adults to say that they don't want a relationship with someone who has no time for them. If Quirky was looking for a "relationship" early book Hannah was a terrible pick.
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I loved Rumer Godden's An Episode of Sparrows, so clearly I should check out her ballet book instead.
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---L.
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