The Cranes Dance

Title           : The Cranes Dance
Writer       : Meg Howrey
Genre        : Contemporary Fiction
Pages         : 384
Publisher : Vintage Book
Published : May 15th, 2012


If you like dancing so much or especially ballet, this is a must-read book you ought to have. Me? I like ballet (even only enjoying the ballerina's dancing) but I don't know much about it. It's like there is a sonorous mystery moves the ballerina every time they are on stage, dancing. It's what I saw while reading it.

"I'm standing in my dressing room now. I am here. i am in the present tense. I'm not always here, and sometimes here is a difficult place. Sometimes it is a labyrinth, or a Minotaur, or a rope I can neither let go of nor follow. It's hard to find the right words, but I guess I would say that it's something like feeling the floor"

If you have watched the movie entitled Black Swan, played by the famous Natalie Portman, you'll find it parallel with this Howrey's novel. But unlike Black Swan, the story of this novel almost attached firmly in reality.

What thrilled me the most about its story is the relationship of Cranes sisters. Kate and Gwen Crane. You'll find it both cherish and despise in such sisterhood relationship, revealing the private lives of two dancers and also the boundaries between them as sisters.

Kate is a soloist in a ballet company and Gwen, her younger sister,is a principal in that same company. For average people like me who know nothing about ballet would find that being principal is better than a soloist. But, Gwen is sick. She is recovering from a nervous breakdown and Kate just threw out her neck. She gets to play the lead only to fall victim to guilt, insecurity, and Vicodin.

"I threw my neck out in the middle of Swan lake last night"

Kate Crane is on her own to deal with her sister's condition.