Girl Through Glass
Sari Wilson, 2016
HarperCollins
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062326270
Summary
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 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 parents’ 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 friend and 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 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 capsize 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.
Moving between the past and the present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, perfection, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy—or save—us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; Stanford University (Fellowship)
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Sari Wilson grew up in a Victorian brownstone in Brooklyn Heights in New York City and has also lived in San Francisco, Chicago, and Prague. She now lives in Brooklyn, again, with her husband, the cartoonist Josh Neufeld, and their daughter.
Wilson's debut novel Girl Through Glass (2016) is, in many ways, a deeply personal book based on her early experiences in the classical dance world. As a child, she studied ballet at Neubert Ballet Theater, a once-storied Carnegie Hall studio.
Later, she studied at Harkness Ballet and as a scholarship student at Eliot Feld’s New Ballet School. She went on to study and perform modern dance with Stephan Koplowitz and at Oberlin College, where she majored in history and minored in dance.
In an NPR interview, Wilson talked about having to leave the world of dance:
It was my life, and I hit puberty and then sort of the dark side of things revealed themselves, and I struggled through for a long time, and then finally left that world after a second career-ending surgery. And then I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what had happened, and [Girl Through Glass] is really my investigation into that.
After college—and after dance—Wilson attended Stanford University (1997-1999) as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, where she was a teaching assistance for Tobias Wolff.
She went on to work for some 10 years as a writer, editor, and curriculum developer. She has had a particular interest in interactive narrative and story design, championing graphic literature as an educational tool. Along with her husband, she started Dojo Graphics, a studio creating comics and motion comics for television, film, and the Internet. Their clients have included Lion Television/PBS, ABC, and Lifetime.
Wilson has also been a Fine Arts Work Center Fellow in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and has received a residency from The Corporation of Yaddo.Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in literary journals such as Agni, Oxford American, and Slice. (Adapted from the author's website. Retrieved 2/22/2016.)
Book Reviews
A tragic depiction of a girl adored far too soon by a grown-up world…. Artfully rendered through the viewpoint of an adolescent dancer who performs with great maturity while remaining fatefully naive.... So visceral, so real.
Washington Post
[T]he story is a uniformly engrossing look into the fabled world of hypercompetitive 1970s ballet. Mira and Maurice’s relationship has the fairy tale feel of Beauty and the Beast, but the pages brim with the realism of the gritty.... Wilson writes lovingly of ballet and elevates the coming-of-age story with a dark undercurrent about the cost of obsession.
Publishers Weekly
[A]n 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. —Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.
Library Journal
(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
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available. In the meantine, use these LitLovers talking points to kick-start a discussion for Girl Through Glass...then take off on your own:
1. Girl Through Glass alternates between two time frames, an adult Kate and young Mira. Describe "both characters—how does the older Kate differ from her younger self?
2. Follow-up to Question 1: How does Kate's past life, as Mira, shape her present life—including her bitterness, her lackluster career, and her current relationship with a student?
3. Talk about the world behind the scenes at the American Ballet Theater and/or the American Ballet School. How does Girl Through Glass portray the life of the dancers, including the competition among them and their physical ordeals?
4. Other stories, both books and film, have explored the obsessive, competitive, and sometimes seamy side of the ballet world—Hans Christian Andersen's The Red Shoes (and film, 1948 ), Turning Point (film, 1977), Center Stage (film, 2000), Black Swan (film, 2010), Breaking Pointe (TV, 2012), Flesh and Bone (TV 2015), and Maggie Shipstead's Astonish Me (novel, 2014). If you have read or watched any of those, how does Girl Through Glass compare?
5. What does the world of dance offer Mira as she navigates her way through her parents' unraveling marriage? Talk about the ways in which the dance world saves and/or fails her.
6. What drives balletomanes and the character of Maurice? Does he make you feel uneasy, even queasy...or not? What does Mira gain from Maurice...and vice versa? What does Maurice's infatuation with Mira suggest about the power of a young body? Describe the nuances of the relationship between Maurice and Mira? Who is in control? Does the power equation change?
7. Maurice instills in Mira the "understanding of what you have to give up to be beautiful." What does Mira (and any other dancer) have to give up, and is the sacrifice worth it?
8. Where you surprised by what Kate uncovers when she returns to New York? Does the revelation address unanswered questions or tie up loose ends? Does the conclusion feel overly coincidental...or does it work?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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