Get Your Hands On Stay On Your Toes, Maggie Adams! Written By Karen Strickler Dean Presented In Brochure
a ballet dancer, now teacher, this deals with anorexia, the pressure of being in the corps de ballet and trying to move up the ranks, dealing with mental health, and a lot of the demons in ballet well.
I've been hoping for this final book in the trilogy to show up in a used bookstore for about twenty years, Finally, my husband just ordered it for me, and I reread the first two in preparation, I still like the first book, where Maggie turns fifteen and her mother decides to go to college, But here Maggie is nineteen, and the story hasn't changed a bit, None of the characters has grown or progressed, Maggie and Doug have the same argument over and over and over in all three books, and there's nothing to indicate they have any kind of real relationship, It's terrifying to imagine that women actually considered marriage proposals at eighteen and nineteen based on relationships like that,
Sadly, the story and the writing are just cringe inducing, Every exchange and interaction is repetitive and simple, If you like dance books, read the first one, Back when I first came across the Maggie Adams books,, this one wasn't available, so this was my first time reading the end of the trilogy, And I must admit I wasn't impressed, There seems to be less ballet and more melodramaand I use "melodrama" because pretty much all the emotions exhibited by these characters felt over the top, So Yeah. to know what I think you could just read the othergoodread reviews, Written in the mids by someone who grew up in thes or earlier, and it shows! The main emotional conflict of the book is that Maggie's boyfriend wants her to quit dancing in SF and move to Boston where he's studying at MIT, and Maggie realises this will probably end her career, so she refuses.
This is a reasonable emotional conflict and in itself doesn't feel too dated, but the fact that neither Maggie nor the other characters ever imagine that she might have options OTHER than "ballet" or "marry the guy" does feel very odd.
And several of the other women are depicted as facing
similar choices it's marriage or dance, nothing else, no college or other careers, In spite of this the book manages to be pretty feminist in its depiction of Maggie's dedication to her career, but I still found the narrowness of vision odd.
That contributed to the two, but the real problem was that the book was boring, Maggie's conflict isn't enough to power the entire book, but it fills her mind so thoroughly that the subplots about her friends don't really come to life, Also, I was struck by how unpleasant all the characters tended to be to one another! If someone consistently talked to me the way that Maggie amp her friends talk to each other in this book I wouldn't consider them a friend, but they seem to take the snippiness and impatience and so forth for granted.
I find unpleasant behavior unpleasant to read about, Poor Maggie Adams. Her dancer boyfriend not only doesn't appreciate that she is an outstanding ballet dancer, but he even asks her to move from San Francisco to Boston to be with him.
The Prima Ballerina is jealous of Maggie, the director of the company singles her out for constant criticism and abuse, a close friend succumbs to anorexia and delusions, her two roommates are having boyfriend troubles, and when an attractive Swedish director asks Maggie, a mere apprentice dancer, to fill in during rehearsals for the injured Prima Ballerina, Maggie endures jealousy and pettiness but wins acclaim.
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