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Summary
Summary
Adam and Sandra are ballet dancers, friends since they were fifteen, and now lovers. Sandra is a dancer in the corps of the New York City Ballet who has just caught George Balanchine's eye. Adam is an explosively gifted new star who has defected to the rival company, the American Ballet Theatre. They are in love, passionate and ambitious, but ill-prepared to handle the demands, seductions, and expectations that are visited on them as they come within reach of their dreams. The novel proceeds from a true premise: Since the beginning of his career, Balanchine sought to create an opulent ballet from the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, but never had the means and the muse come together at the same time. In First Love, Adrienne Sharp conjures in Sandra a last muse for the ailing ballet master. Balanchine promises to make Sleeping Beauty for her, and that it will be his final and greatest ballet. But Balanchine's favor comes at a price, and Sandra is forced to decide which of her loves comes first. Should she continue her tumultuous involvement with the first boy to capture her heart and succumb to his vision of their future? Or should she accept all that Balanchine offers-the fulfillment of a dream nurtured from childhood during endless hours at the barre? A former ballet dancer herself, Adrienne Sharp's first book was the acclaimed short-story collection White Swan, Black Swan. Sharp's debut novel features the same marvelous storytelling as it revisits the vivid and rarefied world of dancers, and the sacrifices and hard bargains they make in pursuit of beauty, grace, and consummate passion.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Former ballerina Sharp presents a sentimental portrait of two ballet dancers, Sandra Ellis and Adam LaSalle, in her debut novel (after her collection White Swan, Black Swan). Best friends since the age of 15, Sandra and Adam become lovers in their 20s, by which point Adam has left Balanchine's New York City Ballet for starring roles with Baryshnikov's American Ballet Theater, while Sandra remains a loyal member of the corps. Sharp frames the novel, set in the '80s, with the fairy tale of "Sleeping Beauty," a story that Balanchine had in reality always wanted to choreograph but never fully did. Here, though, Sandra serves as the inspiration for Balanchine's staging of the tale: she catches his eye because of the passion Adam has awoken, and Balanchine plucks her from the corps to transform her into a principal dancer in the epic. But Sandra struggles to choose between her relationship with Adam and the total commitment and sacrifice she believes Balanchine requires. The point of view shifts between each corner of this triangle, often dragging with Adam and Sandra's inner monologues but sparkling with Balanchine's richly reimagined story. Sharp offers a detailed insider view of the ballet world, but her love story, though intelligently written, can mire in the maudlin. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A fine debut imagines George Balanchine's last year--and depicts the elegant, often brutal world of ballet. In New York in the early '80s, we follow two young lovers, Adam and Sandra, as they struggle with the demands of dance careers--his on the rise, hers going nowhere. Adam was born to this world: his parents were dancers, as was his godfather, Randall, and Randall's partner, Joe, is a choreographer. Adam, now 20, has just left Balanchine's female-dominated NYC Ballet for Baryshnikov's American Ballet Theater, where he is becoming a star, but at a price: Quaaludes and cocaine fuel his days, and his loneliness is quelled by the anonymous young men and women he takes to bed. As filled with promise and people as is Adam's life, Sandra's is conversely bleak. Her mother died when she was a baby (a fairy tale standby that goes along with the novel's Sleeping Beauty motif), and she lives with her mentally ill father, a Civil War historian, in a rambling apartment her wealthy grandmother funds. After lingering in the corps for years, Sandra suddenly catches Balanchine's eye, who plans to star her in Sleeping Beauty. Adam and Sandra's turbulent relationship (their youthful lust is secondary to Adam's jealousy of Balanchine, who plucks girls from obscurity, then wins their souls) is the heart of the narrative, but, as in fairy tales, it's overshadowed by the far more interesting parent-child relationships Sharp (stories, White Swan, Black Swan, 2001) creates. Randall is dying of AIDS just as Adam is reconnecting with his philandering father. Sandra is unable to save her father from his depression, just as the childless Balanchine plans to make her his perfect daughter. At the center of all this is the dying Balanchine, slipping in and out of reveries of his past, pretending there is enough time left to mount one last production. A noteworthy, if melancholy, examination of the dancer's life: years of suffering for moments of beauty. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
As she did in her superb short story collection, White Swan, Black Swan(2001), Sharp, a former dancer, dramatizes the romance, ambition, and obsessive eroticism of the dance world in her ravishing first novel, adeptly partnering real-life figures with fictional creations. Set in the early 1980s at the height of American ballet's frenzied popularity and the onset of the AIDS epidemic, it stars the genius dance master George Balanchine, now aging and haunted. As he dreams of creating one last epic work, a sumptuous Sleeping Beauty, two young dancers long for greatness. Adam, a sexual magnet for men and women, has left Balanchine's company for Baryshnikov's and become a star, but Sandra, fragile and elusive, continues to dance in Balanchine's corps. Opposites attract, but love is a liability in their competitive realm. Just as a dancer fuses with her roles, Sharp fully inhabits the troubled psyches and hard-driven bodies of her commanding yet maddening characters, describing with transporting detail everything from a costume's cut and sparkle to a tragic kiss. Sharp's bewitchingly sensual and trenchant tale embodies the sublime and the monstrous aspects of dance and explores our depthless capacity for exultation and suffering. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist
Library Journal Review
First novelist and author of the short story collection White Swan, Black Swan, Sharp, a former dancer, uses the New York City ballet world as a backdrop for a mesmerizing tale of what-if. Based on the life and work of ballet master George Balanchine, this novel looks at what could have been had the dancer and choreographer realized his dream of staging the Sleeping Beauty ballet before his death in 1983. This dream is made possible through his discovery of young ballerina Sandra Ellis, whom he uses as his final muse. But complications with her troubled father and ballet star boyfriend, Adam LaSalle, take her in directions that Balanchine disapproves. Running parallel to Balanchine's story is that of Sandra and Adam and their intense, if not occasionally unhealthy, love for each other and the very different ways in which they express their devotion. Sandra must cope with Adam's fierce longing for her and his destructive and disloyal behavior when he is away on tour, while Adam must struggle with Sandra's blas? attitude toward her own existence and obsessive devotion to Balanchine. All of these issues factor into a stark look at what first love can be like, with all its twists, turns, and, inevitably, pain. Recommended for all library collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/05.]-Leann Restaino, Girard, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
