Anyone who hasn’t figured out who Harry’s real father is long before the flashback that jarringly opens Part IV simply hasn’t been paying attention. It takes a while for Part III to regain the lost momentum as Chloe and Harry study ballet, he becomes obsessed with his mother’s connection to Arslan, and it becomes clear that Harry is a major talent.

K judges (correctly) that she’s not good enough to dance with him. It’s a jolt when Part II jumps back to 1973 in Paris, where Joan is transported by Arslan’s dancing and “wants some piece of the fearsome beauty he has onstage.” We already know she helped him defect from the Soviet Union, so it feels unnecessary to get a detailed account of it and of the subsequent unraveling of their affair in New York, partly because autocratic artistic director Mr. This strong setup is anchored by Shipstead’s sensitive portrait of the couple’s uneasy relationship and their complex friendship with Southern California neighbors Sandy and Gary Wheelock, whose daughter Chloe is Harry’s age. The rest of Part I depicts their tense marriage-scarred by Joan’s bereavement over leaving ballet-from son Harry’s infancy through the mid-1980s. She’s also pregnant after a summer visit to Chicago to seduce her high school pal Jacob.

When we meet Joan in September 1977, she’s tired of her going-nowhere career in the ballet corps of a prestigious New York company, where she’s primarily known as the discarded lover of star performer Arslan Rusakov.

After satirizing privileged WASPs in her prize-winning first novel ( Seating Arrangements, 2012), Shipstead investigates another rarefied world: ballet.

Astonish Me by Maggie Shipstead