This was a compelling and insightful book about friendship and what it takes to succeed in a competitive career in the arts. Delphine, Lindsay, and Margaux are best friends who met training to be members of the Paris Ballet. Delphine, whose mom had previously been a star with the Paris Ballet, becomes a soloist but then leaves the Paris Ballet and the city to move to St. Petersburg to pursue a new relationship and a potential career as a choreographer -- and also to flee a secret that could devastate her friendships. Thirteen years later, Delphine has returned to Paris, working on choreographing a new ballet for the Paris Ballet that she hopes will launch the next phase of her choreography career. Delphine is also hoping to reconnect with Lindsay and Margaux. But she finds that while she has been away, Lindsay, Margaux, and her former colleagues have all moved on, even as the secrets from the past continue to haunt her life in Paris.

This book is an impressive debut -- offering a story that grips your attention and interesting perspectives on several important issues. Highly recommended!

A ballet is refined and beautiful. It’s an exquisite art form polished to perfection. But behind the scenes, it looks much more dour, and I’m not talking about the ballerina’s bruised and battered feet. It’s an insular world built on competition, jealousy, and dark ambition. The only way to the top is at the expense of fellow competitors.

Delphine, Lindsey, and Margeaux quickly bond during their training at the Paris Opera Ballet. Although friends, they are competitors first and foremost. The novel unfolds in two parts. One moves from teen years forward following their training and bond through the trials of preparation, as each aspires to become the next star. The other follows the three in differing stages of adult life, suddenly thrust back together on the same stage. It’s obvious that the years have not been kind to the friendship. The mystery of what transpired to create the shift unfolds slowly and steadily.

Kapelke-Dale does an adept job of showcasing the cutthroat nature experienced behind the curtain. Perfect pirouettes begin out of destruction and determination. The training, dedication, and competition that goes into the most graceful arabesque is well examined through the three main characters. As someone who has enjoyed the beauty of the stage, I was equally enamored by this novel’s look at the inner workings that companies and dancers go through to get to the stage worthy point.

Up until the half point of the novel, it appeared the author’s messaging was in regard to the tumult women suffer in order to get ahead. But at the half way mark, the messaging seemed to shift to that of misogyny and patriarchy, with strong “Me too” vibes. As much as I appreciate the exploration of the multiple themes and consider them timely and necessary, I didn’t feel as though the storyline had enough depth with which to properly discern each issue brought forth. To me, the continual addition of a new component within the many themes muddled the overall message.

Though not an upbeat read, I do not think the comparison being drawn between this book and Black Swan is accurate. Not only is this book not as dark as Black Swan, it also doesn’t hit the mark of a true thriller. Instead, The Ballerinas lends itself more closely to character driven women’s fiction.

Thank you Rachel Kapelke-Dale, St. Martin’s Press, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review an advanced copy of this book.

Ballerinas are delicate and beautiful dancers who move with precision and effortlessness. But unbeknownst to their audience, what is going on inside their minds can be quite shocking.

Delphine, Lindsay and Margaux met at ballet school as teens. Since then they have been best friends as well as competitive dancers while continuing to be each other’s cheerleaders. All that was changed when an incident occurred which altered their friendships as well as their individual lives.

Delphine, now in her mid-thirties, who basically ran away from her friends after the incident fled to St. Petersburg, and now has come back to France as a choreographer preparing a new ballet. She is a rising star, she has been told. Hoping to rekindle the friendships, she casts both friends in the ballet, along with a male dancer whom Delphine has never been able to get out of her mind. But she immediately realizes this was perhaps a mistake. You cannot really go back to relationships which had been fractured and never been put back together.

As the tension mounts with the friends, Delphine finds out the woman who basically raised her is having medical problems. Delphine’s mother was a prima ballerina in her day, known all over the world. The most shocking thing her mother ever did was actually have Delphine when she found out she was pregnant. Because as ballerina’s know, pregnancy changes the body and then there goes your career.

But their past secrets and resentments do come back to haunt the women. Who they loved, why they married, and who they left are were never answered questions among them. Delphine soon discovers that her friends whom she thought had it all clearly did not. They too had regrets, a fear of getting older. Even secrets which are hidden in plain sight which will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

The story moves back and forth from their current situations to when they first met and the escapades they all endured, some funny and some heartbreaking. But no matter who was angry at who their camaraderie could not be broken. Until it broke.

Sometimes friendships can become toxic and unhealthy, but true friends are able to move past those parts and regrow what was the base of the bond from all those years ago. Even when the love they have for each other takes a dramatic turn, one no one could have seen coming. But will they survive the new secrets which now must be hidden?

The Ballerinas is an interesting behind the scenes look at what it must be like to be a classical dancer, the pain they tolerate as they put their bodies through enormous stress, as well as the competition element which certainly makes it difficult to be friends, never mind stay friends, But the twist at the end is by far well worth watching the whole performance!

Thank you #NetGalley #St.Martin’sPress #TheBallerinas #RachelKapeke-Dale for the advanced copy. The book will be out December 7.

This is labeled as a mystery/thriller but I didn't find anything really thrilling about it.

The three girls, Delphine, Margaux and Lindsay meet as children in ballet school and work their way up the ladder of the POB in the hopes of someday being a principal dancer. The story mostly focuses on Delphine whose mother was a star ballerina and raised her daughter alone. Lindsay was an American who rarely saw her parents as they didn't like to fly. Hers and Margaux's background were pretty vague and I never felt connected to any of the characters. I really, really wanted to love this book because I love ballet but I felt like the author didn't know if she wanted to write a mystery/thriller or a feminist treatise and succeeded at neither one.

I would like to thank Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for providing me with a copy of this book.

This is an interesting book about ballet and dancers. As I was always fascinated by ballet I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt for the characters.
it's about rivalry, toxic friendship and the characters are damaged both phisically and mentally.
An interesting read, a bit slow burning.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

From the book description, The Ballerinas seemed to have everything that I enjoy in a book. However, as I plunged into it, I found that this book wasn't quite what I anticipated. I still managed to find it an enjoyable read for the most part, most likely because I enjoy stories tied to dance and ballet.

This novel follows three friends from their early years at a dance academy to present day. Frankly, I found all three of these women to be fairly unlikable. Even though I probably had the most empathy for the main character, Delphine, she still did things that I found frustrating.

There was a feminist touch to the storyline which I thought was well done - - especially considering the stress placed on ballerinas to have the perfect body and so forth. The fact that others seem to believe that women don't own their own bodies was a strong theme in the book. In addition, the author did a nice job of trying to display how women don't always support one another. Unfortunately, we are often thrown into competition with one another and forget that we should lift one another up instead of tearing each other down. Obviously, ballet is a cut throat competition where few slots are available for advancement.

The only thing that disappointed me about The Ballerinas was that the author chose to make every male in the book have a dark side to them. I'm all for showing that men can't always relate to women's issues and sometimes think they may "own" women in a way. However, I think that message could have still been passed along without leaving the book with no men of integrity. There was a minor male character toward the end of the book that seemed to be somewhat decent. However, every other one had proven to be a strong disappointment over the course of the book. I, personally, found that to be a bit extreme. I believe the strength and resiliency of women does show through in this book. It demonstrates that things are definitely messy and we often fail one another, but there is still hope to pull together and stand strong.

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC. I voluntarily chose to review it and the opinions contained within are my own.

Audiobook Review: I both read and listened to this book. I found the narrator for the audiobook to be quite talented. She drew me into the story and made it a more enjoyable experience for me.

Ever since they were child ballerinas coming up through the ranks of the Paris Opera Ballet School, Delphine, Margaux and Lindsay have been the best of friends. Delphine, the daughter of a former POB star, is the nice one, while wild-haired, sharp-tongued Margaux is the bitchy one and gorgeous American Lindsay is the hot one. As the girls grow up, learning their craft and competing for the few coveted spots for advancement that open up each year, they freely share their triumphs and heartaches, until one unimaginable betrayal changes everything.

Years later, a 36 year-old Delphine is returning to Paris from her time in St Petersburg, where she’s given up performing in favor of developing a career as a choreographer with the Mariinsky Ballet. The POB has commissioned her to create several new pieces for them, and Delphine is determined to use this chance to further the careers of both her friends, stuck still as soloists and with only a scant few years to make principal before facing retirement. The perpetually sunny Lindsay is eager to seize this opportunity but Margaux is far more suspicious, eventually confronting her old friend and demanding they apologize for their sins:

QUOTE
“I see you,” Margaux said, eyes fixed on me. “I see you all eaten up just like I am. You thought you could move home and we’d just go back to being a happy threesome, like we were before. But what we did, Delphine, it ruined everything.” She paused, letting her words sink in. “There’s nothing we can do to change her past, but we could still change her future.”

“But what good would it do for her, apologizing? It would just be for us.[”]
END QUOTE

And so a guilt-ridden Delphine strives to make up for what she’s done by giving her friends the future of their dreams. Trouble is, dreams are always hard to achieve, even with a fairy godmother in your corner. Delphine soon finds herself battling not only the demons of her past but also the many obstacles set in the way of women in the dance world. Whether it be demanding artistic directors, competition from eager and more flexible younger ballerinas, or the rampant misogyny that insists that women know their place, Delphine finds herself hurdling countless barriers as she seeks to repair her dearest childhood friendships. But how far will she go to get what she wants... and would she go so far as to kill?

This atmospheric novel felt so much like an insider’s view of life in the European ballet world that I’m genuinely surprised Rachel Kapelke-Dale was never herself a professional dancer with the POB. She writes beautifully as well about the cities of Paris and St Petersburg, romantic settings that place into harsher focus all the ways that women get swept up into then find themselves unwittingly affirming a patriarchy that wishes to control their bodies. Nowhere is this more bleakly apparent than in the seemingly female-focused world of ballet that an adolescent Delphine both loves and abhors:

QUOTE
I knew what the fucking point was: the point of all of this. We’d honed ourselves for so many years into something resembling perfection. Developed our strength, our control. And from here, the boys would go on to build more, more, growing their muscles and getting bigger and better and stronger. But for the girls, it was something different. It was about taking our strength and making it pliable, supple, compliant.
END QUOTE

Delphine is a complicated heroine, who starts out blind to her own poor judgment before growing increasingly disillusioned by the phantoms she’s chasing and then, in the novel’s climax, lashing out in an attempt to make up for all the times she’s failed the concept of sisterhood before. The Ballerinas is most powerful when it speaks of feminine solidarity, when characters such as Delphine refuse to be cowed by the men in their lives and stand up for not only their own autonomy but also for what’s right, no matter the often harmful consequences. While I felt that some of the career moves were accepted more prosaically than the build up to those points would warrant, I did feel that this was a moving testament to the power of feminism and genuine friendship to heal wounds and work toward a better tomorrow together.

I would recommend this book for fans of Megan Abbott and Jessica Knoll. It is a fast-paced, character-driven novel that will immerse you in the fictional world of the Paris Opera Ballet where three friends grapple with their past and future selves.

Fourteen years ago, former ballerina, Delphine, left her soloist spot at the prestigious Paris Opera Ballet for a new life as a choreographer in Russia. Now, Delphine has returned to choreograph a ballet that will hopefully change her whole career, and that will mend the bridge between her and her two friends, Lindsay and Margaux. The trio was once inseparable, but a dark secret has festered and turned their friendship into something precarious. It's clear to Delphine that many things have changed in the years she's been gone, and some secrets can't stay buried for long.

I'm a little thrown by this one. The synopsis made it sound like it was going to be some twisted thriller, but it was more of a literary fiction mixed with some women's drama. It's not to say it was bad; it just wasn't necessarily what I was expecting. I did enjoy the setting and the ballet environment, but that was about it. The characters were okay, but not one of them was likable, except maybe Delphine's elderly neighbor. They all had such huge egos and were incredibly selfish. I do think the author nailed how cutthroat this world can be, but it just wasn't for me. The writing style was also slow, and I found myself skim reading some bits to get through it faster. While this does touch upon some darker topics such as body image, sexual assault, and abuse, it was all very surface-level, and I just wanted something more out of it.

The Ballerinas has a past/present storyline. The narrator is 36 year old Delphine. She is a former ballerina with the Paris Opera Ballet.

I liked the Paris setting. But this book is quite slow. I didn't love the parts from the past. And I was definitely hoping for more of a thriller.

The book does focus a lot on the female friendships between Delphine, Lindsay and Margaux. So that was interesting. And I do enjoy reading about the ballet. The competitiveness and the lengths that the dancers have to go to in order to get parts is fascinating.

The last part did have more happening. But I really wanted to care more about these characters. Overall, I really would have preferred to see the mystery aspect expanded.

I had really, really high hopes for The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale, but it felt a little too unenthusiastic. First, it was long for a thriller and second, overall it felt more like women's fiction than a thriller. While there was a big overarching mystery to the whole story, it took the backseat to the drama that ensued between the main characters. I wanted more thrill, a crazier twist and some real back stabbing. But it was all a little vanilla, unfortunately. The writing was fantastic but could have been trimmed down. I think the story could have been shorter without losing any punch.

Thank you Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Oh this was a WILD RIDE that I was not expecting but loved anyway! The insight into the insanely competitive world of ballerinas was so addicting. I don't know details about ballet and dancers but this book seems very well-researched.

Definitely a character-driven book. My favorite thing was how throughout the book the author perfectly grasped the awkwardness of when you try to keep a friendship from your teenage years but it's just not working.

My only issues are that the plot seems to be all over the place at times, and I would've liked a more drawn out ending.

This book tells the story of a former ballerina and her efforts to stage a ballet in Paris. Told with alternating chapters, the story sometimes brought confusion as to which year the plot was in. Once I realized the pattern, the book was an OK read. Nothing more. Nothing less.

I absolutely love The Ballerinas, everything about it. Not only is it set in beautiful Paris, in an exclusive ballet school, but the characters are lifelike and relatable. The friendship between Delphine, Lindsay, and Margaux is characteristic of all long-time female friendships. We support each other, and we love each other, but we also hurt each other, mostly unintentionally, but sometimes on purpose, and for that we feel guilt and pain. It makes us pull away, but hopefully find each other in the end. Whatever the case, true friends always come when needed, just as these three women did. The Ballerinas spoke to me, and I am going to be sharing this one with my close friends. I think it would be the perfect book club book!

Delphine, Margeaux, and Lindsay met as young ballerinas at the Paris Opera Ballet School, and grew up together while climbing the ranks of the company.

Delphine up and left her soloist position in pursuit of something new in St Petersburg 14 years ago, taking a secret with her.

She returns to Paris in her mid-thirties as a choreographer.

Told in alternating timelines between past and present, the mystery of Delphine's secret is slowly revealed.

Like Center Stage meets Black Swan, it was fun to experience the drama and cutthroat world of ballet through Delphine's eyes.

I went in expecting a thriller but this was more of a slower mystery/suspense character driven story. I liked that there were a lot of social issues observed and challenged, but it felt overwhelming as the focus was drawn in several directions.

I grew up with a love of dance, a ballerina only in my dreams; I was always mesmerized by the world of ballet, and really enjoyed being a part of it in this book.

Thank you for the chance to read it in advance!

Imagine a ballerina tightly twirling with an unbound copy of a book pressed to her chest, with so much poise and promise, only to stumble and fling the loose pages all over the stage. She gathers most of them up in random order, does an arabesque, and hands the reshuffled, incomplete story over to you to read.

That story is The Ballerinas, Rachel Kapelke-Dale’s debut novel about three friends who meet while studying at the Paris Opera Ballet in the late 1990s. The book takes readers in leaps and backwards bounds to various years between then and 2019 as one of them, Delphine, tries to atone for a past wrong by choreographing a ballet herself.

The world Kapelke-Dale creates is an interesting one that will (obviously) appeal most to people who love ballet. While I do not, I still found the glimpse into the lifestyle of professional ballerinas fascinating. However, the choppy, over-stuffed story just didn’t work for me. Somehow in a mere 304 pages she manages to cram in: mean girl tropes, statutory rape, feminism, cancer (twice), infertility, abortion, adultery, and murder. If the novel were a ballet, it should be called “L’evier de la Cuisine” (“The Kitchen Sink”).

When considering how to shelve The Ballerinas, it seems most apt to blandly call it “fiction.” The suspense isn’t that suspenseful, and the mystery isn’t very mysterious. Because the characters go from teenagers to women in their 30s, it’s also not necessarily YA, new adult, contemporary, or women’s fiction.

I’m rooting for this author’s growth and will be curious to see what she writes next. Should it be a novel with a linear narrative and a more focused plot, she just might find me in her audience. But I’ll leave any further efforts like The Ballerinas to the ballerinas.

I absolutely love the cover and that was ultimately what drew me in. I wanted to like this one a lot.

I love thrillers and this one is being marketed as one, but be aware that nothing within that vein of genre happens until the last 10%. This is where literally ALL the action takes place.

We have the ballerinas, Delphine, Margeaux and Lindsay who are somewhat peas in a pod, they are besties but as best as friends can get when they are constantly competing against each other. Each of them thinking that they are the best while willing to push others down to ensure they get the spot.

I didn't find any of the characters in this one likeable. They were all quite selfish in their thoughts, words and deeds. Not one male figure had any redeemable qualities whatsoever.

What I did like was that some of them had the realization of what they were doing and how it was hurting all those around them. I understand one thing, the business of the ballet is cut throat and absolutely horrid on your self worth and confidence.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press, Rachel Kapelke-Dale and NetGalley for the review copy.

4.5 stars

The Ballerinas by Rachel Kapelke-Dale is a compelling novel about friendships, loyalty, betrayals and addiction to an art form, in this case, classical ballet.
Told in alternating timelines, starting in 1995 and 2017, and from the first person POV of Delphine Durand, this is the story of three 13 year-old girls immersed in their training at the Paris Opera Ballet.
Their friendships are intense and complicated as the girls compete for a shrinking number of openings in the prestigious ballet company. The beauty of the ballet and its focus on perfection is contrasted with the darker aspects of ambition and competition for favor and personal promotion. The story unfolds beautifully from an arresting preface to the startling conclusion, with strong writing, terrific character development, and enough foreshadowing to keep the reader engaged throughout.
This is a love story to ballet, ballerinas, and Paris, as well as a novel that explores the more serious topics of ambition and its costs, female friendships and their survival when tested.
I highly recommend this novel to lovers of ballet and ballet history, and readers searching for a riveting story featuring strong female characters and their life journeys.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the ARC. This is my unbiased review.

Though I only ever danced ballet as a fun, extracurricular activity when I was growing up, the business of ballet and the lives of those who become ballerinas continues to fascinate me. It’s demanding in so many directions and is still confronting much of its problematic history (and present) in terms of representation, body image, sexism, and more. Rachel Kapelke-Dale’s upcoming novel The Ballerinas encapsulates that in-progress reckoning, especially in terms of how ballet treats the women who are so integral to its existence and persistence.

Delphine grew up devoting most of her waking hours to training her body for a career that would be physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding, where competition was fierce and where perfection is the central measuring stick. In 2018, she is returning to the Paris Opera Ballet as a choreographer, reconnecting with old friends – fellow dancers Margaux, Lindsay and Jock as well as her older neighbor, Stella, who served as a second mother figure through her childhood – and confronting old guilt. It’s been thirteen years since she did something that derailed Lindsay’s career prospects and Delphine hopes to make things right by giving Lindsay a key role in the new ballet she is putting together. But Delphine wasn’t just offered a contract because she’s an up-and-coming choreographer. Ballet as a whole and the Paris Opera Ballet in particular are feeling the pressure to own up to their problematic histories (and presents). Delphine is forced to face the role she has played in perpetuating the problems around her and must decide whether and how she can take action to right the wrongs of the past and build a future for herself in the only industry she’s ever known or wanted.

Told in the first person by Delphine, it is through the juxtaposition of flashbacks to her youth and adolescence with her current timeline in 2018 that it gradually becomes clear how much Delphine grows through the course of events in the current timeline. The revelation of just what she and Margaux did to Lindsay has a lot of build up that felt anti-climactic when it was first revealed. But when I viewed in the context of the larger themes of the novel, it actually felt like a better fit than that first glance. The narrative, when viewed as Delphine’s modern self reflecting on the path of her life, becomes a story of a contemporary feminist awakening. Growing up in the 1990s and with her mother as a star of the POB, in many ways Delphine is well aware of the sexism and ageism inherent to ballet – the pressure for an unnatural and usually dangerous physical aesthetic, the limited shelf-life of ballerinas and how that ticking clock creates tension with ticking biological clocks. It’s tempting to believe that realizing it’s there is the first step to improving conditions. But the trouble with that is that it doesn’t bring you any further than the first step. It gives the illusion of progress, of movement while nothing actually changes.

In coming back to Paris and to her old stomping grounds, Delphine realizes that both sexism and ageism run so much deeper than she let herself be aware of for so long. In the end, Delphine confronts these (and other) issues across a wide spectrum, showing both the most overt examples and those so subtle that they almost fold back on themselves to the point where they can play tricks on the mind… which, in turn, helps show how and why so many women need to ignore the truth so much of the time – to acknowledge, recognize, face and fight 24/7 is exhausting and often humiliating. Denial and blind hope or optimism for the future can be so much easier than taking action when there’s no guarantee you’ll personally reap the benefits.

In the end, I go back and forth on how I feel about The Ballerinas as a whole. The story itself was frustrating at times. Delphine’s narration and her personal blind spots felt too convenient in a lot of places for me (certain revelations and twists were so obvious that the pacing dragged) and then when she does have her revelations, her reactions feel almost performative. But then there are some bigger twists at the end that I genuinely didn’t see coming (and enjoyed the more for that fact) and the final pages have me wanting to go back to pay closer attention because it can recolor a lot of the previous narration with additional, ulterior motives, intentionally playing to and with her audience… Those possibilities make the novel as a whole a more compelling mental exercise so that I’m thinking about it and examining it (and enjoying it) more in hindsight. Then again, for all it confronts sexism and ageism, it doesn't really address race in ballet at all and that has certainly been brought to the foreground in recent years so to have it unacknowledged feels like a missed opportunity... but I also don't know that the story and narrative would have been strong enough to hold up to adding race to the mix, leaving me still undecided and thinking about the book.

The Ballerinas will be available December 7, 2021.

As a former ballet dancer this entire novel struck a chord. The battles o body image, talent, and damage to your body and mind. The details and imagery of was shockingly real and accurate. I feel that this novel was very well researched and compiled together. Beautifully written