-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:Bestselling and award-winning author Megan Abbott's revelatory and mesmerizing new novel set against the hothouse of a family-run ballet studio.
With their long necks and matching buns and pink tights, Dara and Marie Durant have been dancers since they can remember. Growing up, they were homeschooled and trained by their glamorous mother, founder of the Durant School of Dance. After their parents' death in a tragic accident nearly a dozen years ago, the sisters began running the school together, along with Charlie, Dara's husband and once their mother's prized student.
Marie, warm and soft, teaches the younger students; Dara, with her precision, trains the older ones; and Charlie, sidelined from dancing after years of injuries, rules over the back office. Circling around one another, the three have perfected a dance, six days a week, that keeps the studio thriving. But when a suspicious accident occurs, just at the onset of the school's annual performance of The Nutcracker—a season of competition, anxiety, and exhilaration—an interloper arrives and threatens the sisters' delicate balance.
Taut and unnerving, The Turnout is Megan Abbott at the height of her game. With uncanny insight and hypnotic writing, it is a sharp and strange dissection of family ties and sexuality, femininity and power, and a tale that is both alarming and irresistible.
Excerpt
The Turnout
They were dancers. Their whole lives, nearly. They were dancers who taught dance and taught it well, as their mother had.
"Every girl wants to be a ballerina ..."
The Turnout showcases how the most beautiful things can hide the darkest ones within the shadows, and how, sometimes, we must go through horrific ordeals to reach the light. As in Give Me Your Hand, Abbott's 2018 novel about the grueling world of scientific research through the eyes of two high-school friends forever bound by a shocking secret, every line of prose in The Turnout sings with the author's unique, poetic voice. One of my favorite lines is her description of the young male ballet dancers in the Durant School — she paints a picture of "…their chests like ship prows yet waists so dainty, like prim bows." The would-be rhyme of "prows" and "bows" is a microcosmic example highlighting Abbott's character, plot and world building skill: Whatever you expect her to write will give out on you like a snapping pointe shoe...continued
Full Review
(564 words)
(Reviewed by Maria Katsulos).
Laura Lippman, author of Lady in the Lake
All one needs to know about a Megan Abbott book is that it's a Megan Abbott book — dreamy, sexy, a deep dive into a subculture that has been exhaustively researched. The Turnout is all those things and more, taking you so far into the world of a small ballet school that you feel the characters' aches and pains in your joints, your feet, and, most dangerous of all, your heart. Tana French, author of The Searcher
There's no one who captures the atmosphere of a tight-knit hothouse world, in all its feverish beauty and brutality, quite like Megan Abbott.
Megan Abbott's The Turnout, a novel about two twin sisters who are dancers, begins at the start of The Nutcracker season. Apart from being a universally beloved show with deep roots in American ballet, The Nutcracker is also the Durant School of Dance's main moneymaker: "Every year, their fall enrollment increased twenty percent because of all these girls wanting to be Clara. Soon after, their winter enrollment increased another ten percent from girls in the audience who fell in love with the tutus and magic."
This economic reliance on the famous ballet rings true for real-life dance studios, too; Natalie Rouland writes in a blog post for the Wilson Center in Washington DC that The Nutcracker "continues to provide essential ticket-...
If you liked The Turnout, try these:
by Juhea Kim
Published 2024
A once-famous ballerina faces a final choice—to return to the world of Russian dance that nearly broke her, or to walk away forever—in this incandescent novel of redemption and love.
by Lucy Ashe
Published 2024
A novel about obsessive love featuring two ballet dancers—identical twin sisters Olivia and Clara Marionetta—with a terrifying climax set in the world of ballet in pre-war London.
Ginseng Roots
by Craig Thompson
A new graphic memoir from the author of Blankets and Habibi about class, childhood labor, and Wisconsin’s ginseng industry.
The Original Daughter
by Jemimah Wei
A dazzling debut by Jemimah Wei about ambition, sisterhood, and family bonds in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore.
Awake in the Floating City
by Susanna Kwan
A debut novel about an artist and a 130-year-old woman bound by love and memory in a future, flooded San Francisco.
Serial Killer Games
by Kate Posey
A morbidly funny and emotionally resonant novel about the ways life—and love—can sneak up on us (no matter how much pepper spray we carry).
I like a thin book because it will steady a table...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!