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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Aug 2021, 352 pages
Paperback:
May 2022, 368 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Maria Katsulos
Buy This Book
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 ..."
That's what their brochure said, their posters, their website, the sentence scrolling across the screen in stately cursive.
The Durant School of Dance, est. 1986 by their mother, a former soloist with the Alberta Ballet, took up the top two floors of a squat, rusty brick office building downtown. It had become theirs after their parents died on a black-ice night more than a dozen years ago, their car caroming across the highway median. When an enterprising local reporter learned it had been their twentieth wedding anniversary, he wrote a story about them, noting their hands were interlocked even in death.
Had one of them reached out to the other in those final moments, the reporter wondered to readers, or had they been holding hands all along?
All these years later, the story of their parents' end, passed...
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-...
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