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Lauren is a 30-year freelance business journalist. She pivoted into my lifelong dream of writing fiction a few years ago when she started ballroom dance lessons. Lauren was immediately very interested -- let's admit it, obsessed -- with the whole world of ballroom but particularly the lives of the dance pros. Most of them are recruited from overseas to teach here as we don't have enough native-born dancers to meet demand. Like all immigrants before them, these pros -- many are from Eastern Europe -- are here for the American dream. But they face difficult odds. Lauren wanted to bring their stories to light.
Lauren Paul has blown open a window into a world I thought I knew but didn't. People watch shows like Dancing With the Stars and think they understand the discipline and heat of ballroom dance, but Paul’s story makes it clear that they've only seen a tiny sliver of this world. She’s created a universe with sexual heat, mind-boggling glamour and deeply invested discipline. It’s got betrayal and jealousy; friendship and love; big-stakes careers where everything is at risk and the winner won’t necessarily take all. The cha cha, it seems, isn’t just a dance. Every page a pleasure!—Sharon Pywell, author of The Romance Reader's Guide to Life: A Novel
A middle-aged woman encounters the dark underbelly of the ballroom dance world in Paul's novel. Ava Thompson escapes the boredom and loneliness of being an empty nester by signing up for ballroom dance lessons at a local studio called DanceFreak. Despite being kicked out of ballet school as a kid, Ava quickly becomes enamored of the glamour of ballroom culture, and of her young Hungarian instructor, Nandi. She struggles with extreme stage fright in performance but keeps booking more classes and entering competitions, determined to succeed. Dance quickly becomes an addiction, and things start to spiral out of control, including her finances, her crush on Nandi, and her growing alienation from her husband.
When one of the instructors, Laszlo, dies at a hotel during a competition, Ava learns that all is not well behind the scenes at DanceFreak: The instructors are forced into exploitative contracts, the studio owner gives free lessons to friends of a "connected" Russian, and Laszlo is rumored to have harbored secret information before he died.
Ava begins to suspect that his death was not an accident, and that she and the others at the studio may be in danger if she keeps digging. This is a page-turning novel with an intimate, tell-all quality, as if Ava is dictating her memoir or spilling secrets to a close friend. The reader is drawn into the glamour and idiosyncrasies of the ballroom dance subculture with descriptions that fully capture Ava's awe: "The cycle of comp energy...begins with a burst of enthusiasm and anticipation, swells in the see-and-be-seen environment of the fancy hotel, and comes to a peak when the dancers compete." Though the narrative finds the characters involved in an organized criminal enterprise, the tone remains gossipy rather than dark.
Paul also deftly weaves in commentary on women struggling with feelings of "invisibility" as they navigate middle age.
An entertaining ride, full of glamour and intrigue.
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