Sari Wilson

I don’t know how to classify this book; it’s not really a ballet book even though there is much about ballet in it. It’s not a love story, it’s not chick lit. It is fully engrossing and my first 5 star read of the new year. I wanted to turn around and start reading it again but my reading schedule doesn’t allow for that. It’s not the type of book I usually read with lots of back and forth in time and characters that are not always likable but it is powerfully written and hard to show more put down.

I admit to a fascination with dancing and ballet specifically. Most young girls of my age were taken to dance school as children. I believe my classes started when I was 5 or 6. I took ballet and tap – it was just what was done. While I never had the ability to do anything more than dance once and a while with my husband I did develop a strong love for the art of the dance. So any time I see a book about the subject I am all over it. While Girl Through Glass wasn’t specifically about the ballet world there was enough to draw me in and the writing and the rest of the story kept me there.

It’s a book about secrets, bad family relationships and trying to find exactly what you are looking for. Mira is a child of a broken home and she only seems to find peace in the rigid structure of her ballet classes. She grows much too mature before her time and her mother is an unmitigated disaster as a parent. Mira’s story is told from the past. Kate is a former dancer who is now a teacher at a college in the Midwest but her position is not secure and she is a little brittle. She makes a disastrous mistake that sends her looking to her past. Her story is told from the present. The two seem to have little to do with each other – until they do.

It is more a book about emotions and life than ballet. It is a book that makes you wonder about the sacrifice that is required for many things – not just something like ballet – and the impact of one’s actions. A really thought provoking book show less

Alternating between past and present, Girl Through Glass is a lyrically written story about a young dancer who takes and is taken by a middle-aged, reclusive balletomane. Both broken (Mira never having felt like a child, never having been treated like one, and with far more power than she understands; Maurice filling his emptiness with aesthetics), they are caught up in a universe they have built together of high beauty. There is no room for anything else in Mira's life.
In the past, Sari show more Wilson shows (through third person perspective) what beauty is, and what it takes to create it. The present (told in the first person) is about what is there without the beauty, what is left behind after the creation and destruction of it.
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I enjoyed this novel, and feel I have taken a way a lot from it. There are wounds created in childhood that can keep a person, in a sense, locked in that age for years. Girl Through Glass shows that genuinely. show less

Loved this book. I feel it was a more coming-of-age novel than about ballet in NYC in the 70s & 80s. Abandonment, family unit dissolution, molestation, weird relationships. Wilson created a very complex character is Mira/Kate and even through all of it, I liked her.

My interest in ballet kept me going on this book. The story is told in parallel time lines - when Mira, the ballet student in question, is 11-14 years old, enters into a creepy relationship with a much older man and suffers major consequences as we find out later; and the present when Mira has changed her name to Kate and is teaching at a college in Ohio. This girl/woman is understandably damaged from her experiences and has a difficult time connecting emotionally with anybody. As a window show more into the ballet world, it was engrossing - the rest of the story, not so much. show less