Girl Through Glass - Sari Wilson

\n \n- \nLong-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize\n \nAn Amazon Best Book of the Month \n \nA Buzzfeed Most Exciting Book of the Year\n \nA The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year & Bestseller\n \nSelected as a Skimm Read \n \nA Refinery 29 Best Book of the Year\n \nChosen as a Rumpus Book Club Selection\n \nChosen as a Bustle Best Literary Debut Novel Written By Women in the Last 5 Years\n \nAn 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 the quest for perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.\n \nIn 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 parent's 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 mentor.\n \nOver 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 higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.\n \nIn 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 capsizes 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.\n \nTold in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy--or save--us.\n \n\n