Critics' Opinion:
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Published Jan 2016
304 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
An enthralling literary debut that tells the story of a young girl's coming of age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet - a story of obsession and the quest for perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.
In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet. Enduring the mess of her parent's divorce, she finds escape in dance - the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism. Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory. It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her mentor.
Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of "Mr. B's girls" - a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness. As she ascends higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.
In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a Midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsizes the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self. When she receives a letter from a man she's long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.
Told in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy - or save - us.
"Starred Review. A nimble, nuanced psychological drama that leaps through time and place with an appropriate and assured agility... Wilson speaks with vibrant authority and acute vulnerability as she exposes the conflicted and competitive behind-the-scenes world of professional ballet." - Booklist
"Uniformly engrossing…Mira and Maurice's relationship has the fairy tale feel of Beauty and the Beast, but the pages brim with the realism of gritty, crime-riddled New York." - Publishers Weekly
"This is an absorbing novel, rich with detail both about ballet and New York. Alongside the unusual setting of Mira's realm of dance are the more familiar emotional struggles of a young woman dealing with adolescence, complicated by precocious talent. Recommended for readers who appreciate complex characters and a carefully crafted style." - Library Journal
"Powerful. Gripping. Incandescent…As powerful storytelling kept me turning the pages, Wilson's extraordinary voice whispered to me about the things that both bind and divide us: desire, ambition and love. This book will stay in my heart for a long time." - Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Translation
"An astonishing debut. At once chilling and sensual, furious and tender, Girl Through Glass…will leave you haunted, mesmerized, and wanting more. I loved it." - Elizabeth L. Silver, author of The Execution of Noa P. Singleton
"A debut novel of exceptional daring and verve, Sari Wilson's Girl Through Glass is a chilling, evocative portrait of the 1970s New York dance world and the young lives it consumed." - Kate Walbert, author of Our Kind
This information about Girl Through Glass was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sari Wilson trained as a dancer with the Harkness Ballet in New York and was on scholarship at Eliot Feld's New Ballet School. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fellow of the Provincetown Fine Arts Center, and her fiction has appeared in Agni, the Oxford American, Slice, and Third Coast. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the cartoonist Josh Neufeld.
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