The Turnout
Megan Abbott
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Turnout
Megan Abbott
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... [a] beautifully dark suspense novel.
Desire and ballet are entwined in a smoldering pas de deux throughout this tightly choreographed thriller.
... dark and juicy and tinged with horror.
Megan Abbott’s take on the world of ballet is anything but sugar coated. Instead, prepare yourself for a story told with such dark intensity that you feel as if you’re reading it under the covers by sputtering torchlight. A sense of brooding menace and cloying claustrophobia exudes from the pages.
Megan Abbott’s provocative, absorbing novels pull back the curtain on worlds we don’t often think of as insular, but are hotbeds of unchecked ambition, anxiety, competition, love and hate, despair and joy.
From the beginning of The Turnout, she establishes a mood of conflict, tension and illicit desire, creating disquieting parallels between ballet and a girl’s emerging sexuality.
This claustrophobic, psychosexual look at people whose lives are governed by deception is one of the best Gothic takes on modern ballet I’ve ever enjoyed.
Megan Abbott, unparalleled anatomist of the harm girls do to themselves and each other in pursuit of a physical ideal, has turned her unsparing gaze...to ballet.
... a blood-red horror story. Meantime, the Durants’ own family romance, recollected in the heat of current events, proves a grimmer fable than is usually recounted.
...it makes complete sense that Abbott turns her attention to another feminine pressure-cooker, the ballet school, in her new novel The Turnout. Certainly anyone who has danced classical ballet...knows what’s coming: the juxtaposition of elegant, gauzy, seemingly effortless beauty on stage with the ugly, punishing hard work behind the scenes.
Even if we don't always like Dara, who has internalized the worst of her mother's ideas, we sympathize with her desire to discover the truth and free herself from her mother's legacy.
Abbott's prose can lean toward high drama worthy of Tchaikovsky (occasionally to its detriment), and the sisters' distorted psyches, unnaturally directed from their infancy toward an uncompromising art form, are rightly examined more in their dark depths than they are portrayed with excessive nuance.
The Turnout is a dance that begins slowly and lures the reader in – Abbott’s writing is razor sharp, offering a precise dissection of complex relationships, sheltered family, sexuality and secrets. Within the beauty of these dancers’ lives is a darkness left to be peeled, layer by layer, until the dying pages. Ominous and unsettling, The Turnout drives the reader to seek answers..
Abbott...has a top-notch ability to reveal the dark undercurrents of women's relationships and sexuality. Her taut, unsettling writing creates tension through the slightest actions and phrases, and keeps the pages turning. This is clever, chilling psychological suspense at its best..
... [a] multifaceted story.
The physicality in Abbott’s prose gives the mounting tension a heartbeat.
... gut-punching noir.