Beattie, Quill & Quire, November 14, 2011įirst off, though I’ve tagged this story with a “dance” designation, it isn’t really about ballet. Schabas, to her enduring credit, resolutely refuses to do just that.

The great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa once said that being an artist means never averting your eyes. No lazy moralist, Schabas lays bare the misunderstandings and insensitivities on all sides: the well-meaning adults who want nothing more than to help Georgia in large part end up making things much worse. Schabas is unforgiving in her examination of the way sex and ballet collide, often with terrible consequences for the young women who are too innocent to comprehend the nature of the forces they are trafficking in. “It was like sex was in everything,” writes Martha Schabas in her deeply unsettling first novel, “lodged in men’s heads and drowning in women’s bodies.” The thought is given to Georgia, a 14-year-old student at the Royal Toronto Ballet Academy, whose increasingly fraught and confusing reactions to her own burgeoning sexuality lead her into a horribly inappropriate and dangerous interaction with the academy’s artistic director. The two heroines couldn’t be more similar in their focus on themselves and their emerging womanhood, or more different in their morals and actions. I have just read the contemporary counterpart, young Torontonian Martha Schabas’ highly praised (and seemingly as often highly damned) first novel concerning a fourteen-year-old facing a similar turning point in her life. Well, my last review was of a sensitive coming-of-age novel set in the late 1930s, Maureen Daly’s deliciously sensuous Seventeenth Summer. Reasonably readable, but left me feeling queasy. This edition: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012. Various Positions by Martha Schabas ~ 2011.