The Ballerinas is a suspenseful, introspective novel by Rachel Kapelke-Dale that dives into the unforgiving world of professional ballet. The novel follows former ballerina Delphine Léger as she returns to the Paris Opera Ballet, her old stomping grounds, to choreograph a ballet on the company. For the past ten years Delphine has been living in St. Petersburg, so her return to Paris is heavy with uncertainty and expectations — will her old friends welcome her with open arms? Will the dancers respect her or still think of her as a 22-year-old member of the corps de ballet? Has she been away long enough for past grudges and rivalries to lose their potency? There’s a sense that Delphine was running away from something when she left Paris all those years ago, a terrible secret involving her best friends Lindsay and Margaux, and now she’s ready to make amends. But as she once again becomes embroiled in the high stakes, high passion atmosphere of the company, Delphine struggles to uphold her sense of self and starts to question whether normal things like friendship, trust, and self-acceptance can exist in the world of ballet. The novel alternates between two timelines, one beginning in 1995 that chronicles Delphine’s teenage years at the Paris Opera Ballet School and the beginning of her friendship with Lindsay and Margaux, and one that follows Delphine’s return to Paris in 2018 and her rocky attempt to make things right.
A slow-burn thriller similar to the work of Liane Moriarty and Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Ballerinas has this dark, gripping energy that makes it impossible to put down. Delphine’s secret pulses underneath the story, pushing the reader forward, and I found myself reading faster and faster as the novel went on, eager to get to the bottom of it all. As a dancer myself, I fell in love with the setting and the premise from the start. Kapelke-Dale knows ballet, and I was impressed with her knowledge of company life, from the way dancers pile themselves with baggy warmups for rehearsal to the way members rise through the ranks from corps to soloist to principal (and, at the Paris Opera Ballet, to étoile). I’m a big fan of novels that jump between the past and the present, and I especially loved it here because both settings — the Paris Opera Ballet School and the Paris Opera Ballet — are equally captivating; the drama of teenage friendships and young romance pervade the former, and the complexity of adult relationships, grief, and feminism fill in the latter. For all the dancers out there, imagine a mashup between Center Stage and The Turning Point (if you know, you know). On top of creating a tense, entertaining thriller, Kapelke-Dale also poses insightful questions about bodily autonomy and agency that feel powerful and timely. I loved The Ballerinas, and can’t wait to see what Kapelke-Dale writes next.
I’d recommend this book to…
- Anyone who loves an emotional thriller that keeps you questioning all the characters until the very end… it’s similar in style to Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty
- Anyone interested in the beautiful and gritty world of ballet… it’s similar in theme to Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead
- Anyone who wants a dramatic, poignant, compulsively readable novel… it’s similar in tone to The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
