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Accepted to the prestigious summer ballet intensive at Allegra Academy on scholarship, sixteen-year-old Mars Chang is thrust into the world of wealthy―and she's determined to stay.
Mars's annoyingly attractive roommate, Alex Bechler, has everything: she's effortlessly cool and easily one of the best dancers in the school. Her big pharma family founded the academy and they're on the verge of launching a new supplement, APL, to make them even richer. So when the head of the academy tasks Mars to secretly switch Alex's supplements with APL in exchange for a chance at year-round enrollment, Mars agrees.
Since Mars already knows nothing at the academy is fair, she decides to help a fellow scholarship student by giving her some APL supplements. At first pills give the girl an instant edge in class, but when they also produce terrifying side effects, Mars suspects that APL might not be safe and that the Bechlers might not have Alex's best interests at heart.
But how can Mars convince Alex that her leading role in the recital might literally kill her?
"The elite ballet school setting provides opportunities for examining race, class, and privilege, and provides a backdrop for high-stakes plotlines [...]. Gory descriptions of injuries come together with dramatic behind-the-curtains plotting to create a tense, foreboding atmosphere [...]" —Kirkus Reviews
"Yu's intense ballet drama is as much a critique of class divisions as it is an adolescent melodrama of ambition and moral conflict, and the feints and flourishes will keep readers riveted. Present alongside other visceral stagings of elitism and entitlement, such as A. K. Small's Bright Burning Stars and Erica Ridley's The Protégée." —Booklist
This information about The Devil's in the Dancers 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.
Catherine Yu writes dark speculative fiction. She is the author of Direwood and Helga, and her short fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine and the Death in the Mouth horror anthology. She was born in Nanjing and is now based in New York.
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