Five years into her career at the North American Ballet, Sylvie Carter has come a long way from the girl she once was—the young, driven ballerina who dutifully kept a list of rules for how to succeed. But as her star in the company rises, every rule gets broken and she becomes a version of herself she no longer recognizes. When a tumultuous, troubling relationship erupts into a devastating scandal for which she alone is blamed, she loses everything. Her reputation is destroyed, her best friend is now her fiercest rival, and the dream she’s worked for her entire life—becoming a prima ballerina—will never be realized. She vows not to ever make the same mistake again.
But when renowned dancer Alessandro Russo joins NAB as a guest artist for the season, Sylvie is magnetically drawn to him. Torn between fear and attraction, she finds herself mentally unraveling but also artistically blossoming as she taps into emotions she’d buried long ago. Caught in a bewildering spiral, she can either let the wounds of the past destroy her or find a way to be reborn.
Release Date: Jun 20, 2023
Heat Level: Erotic
Publisher: Penguin Group
Imprint: Berkley
Price: $11.99
“There are two voices inside of me. One of them is the truth teller. The one who sees things how they are and tells me, whether I like it or not, what I cannot admit to myself. The other is the liar. The one who acts on fear and anxiety. The one that tells me to stay scared because I will fail and who tells me not to take a risk because I’ll fall. The speak the same language but seem to have an almost imperceptibly different dialect. It makes it hard to tell which is speaking.”
Sylvie Carter, a prima ballerina, had her whole future mapped out for herself, including a list to keep her goals on track, but after a forbidden relationship is revealed, and her reputation is in tatters, she becomes seduced by the dark world of ballet. When sex, drugs, and alcohol begin to derail her future, she has to decide whether she wants to fight to be the ballerina she knows she can be or if she will let the darker side of ballet ruin her future.
I am not sure why this is being marketed as a romance because it most definitely is not one. Yes, there is sex and quite a lot of it, but most of it isn’t between the hero and the heroine, and in the end, there is no real happily ever after. I was expecting so much more from this book, and while there were aspects I did like, it was overshadowed by the many problems this story has.
Sylvie came across as highly unlikeable and selfish. I understand the issues that she had, but the way she treated people throughout the story just rubbed me the wrong way. I thought surely there would be some sort of growth in her, or the author would try to redeem her, but that didn’t happen. She was the same old Sylvie until the very end when I am supposed to root for her because she decides to stop drinking and treating everyone badly.
I think this is a case of Melanie Hamrick being a debut author, and she needs to work on character development and making her characters more multi-dimensional so they don’t come across as flat and one-dimensional. I did like Alessandro, and I liked the way he did support Sylvie even when she didn’t truly want his help. The author was previously a ballerina, and her firsthand perspective of ballet lent a very realistic backdrop to her story.
This book is marketed as Colleen Hoover meets black swan, and I think if you’re a fan of Colleen Hoover, this may be up your alley and something you might want to try.
~ Michelle
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