Tense, dramatic and bloody!

The dramatic cover of a dark skinned girl's face swimming in a sea of blood sets the scene perfectly. The background is the high powered extreme and intense world of ballet. The trainee, aspiring young girls are cut off from normal life. They have to work themselves totally, and far too hard. Even if their sacrifice of meagre diet, constant grinding practice, isolation and dedication eventually gets them to the audition stage, they can be casually rejected for having hips to wide, or legs too long, things that they cannot do anything about. The heroine, Laurence, has all this to cope with, plus the additional severe handicaps of being coloured and coming from a poor background. The author's note warns that there are descriptions of blood (blood seems to appear on every page) ritualistic self harm, corpses, body horror and shaming, torture and murder. She doesn't leave much out! Tension crackles throughout the book. At her peak she is rejected for Swan Lake as she has black skin, as it is white ballet, the "ballet blanc". Laure didn't care about anything or anyone, other than the ballet and getting ahead - including a pact with strange supernatural forces. A powerful book.