The Melting Season

A good many books written from the perspective of teenage girls belong in the category of close, but no cigar. The basic components are there but they don't gel, and you can feel the first-person voice straining to be real, to be cool, to hit the nail on the head but missing and finding thumb instead.

Another kind of book that dominates the shelves are the wafty romantic ones in fantastic settings. Not an enchanted glen or something, mind you--those stories can be wonderful--but someplace like ultra-rich Beverly Hills or the Olympic tryouts, real-life, if rare, situations that the writer was infatuated with but didn't really understand.

That's why Celeste Conway's The Melting Season, a full, rich novel about a 16-year-old ballet student, is a rare treat. Right off the bat I liked Giselle and her honest, witty take on things. On the first page she introduces us to her performing arts high school in Manhattan as "the flaky school I go to." A model and a boy from some famous band are among her classmates, but she's not impressed, nor is she lavishly self-deprecating. This is real life for her, and when she goes to school what she notices is the dreariness of the building, which is a converted 19th-century hospital. Yikes.

Giselle is a trustworthy narrator in the way a much older and more self-aware person might be, and that makes sense; after all, this is a kid who has never had a Saturday off from the hard physical work of dancing, who grew up in the strange old-world atmosphere of the ballet, and who lost her dad when she was only six. She's the daughter of world-famous ballerina Marina Parke-Vanova, who swans around in silk pantsuits and kooky turbans and who Giselle calls by her first name. Her father was a Russian-born superstar dancer and choreographer, 25 years her mother's senior. Giselle has his looks, not her mother's--sad, dark eyes rather than a golden glow--and she has canonized him, latched onto her idea of him as perfect and won't let go.

Giselle grew up in a Manhattan apartment that she calls a house, and explains why: because it's so damn big. The place has a *ballroom*. Still, she's well aware of the pitying looks she gets from strangers. You have to feel for a girl whose mother drives around the city with her boyfriend in his slowpoke vintage car, dropping F-bombs (F as in French, as in pretentious smatterings), and generally acting self-indulgent and silly.

Giselle's life is exotic, but thanks to Conway's confident prose the girl really inhabits it--lives in New York like a New Yorker, talks about ballet like a dancer. Giselle is matter-of-fact in her explanation of the Russian fairy tale that inspired *Snegurochka*, the ballet she's rehearsing; the really loving descriptions are reserved for more everyday things, like the three little Chinese girls across the way who wave to Giselle as they jump on their bed. The book is full of wonderful details that make the New York of Conway’s imagination come to life.

And subtly, cleverly, without ever letting us hear the gears whirring, she is telling us another story. Shyly, Giselle lets us in on her secret. She can't sleep over her friends' houses, ever, because the idea of being out of her comfort zone makes her feel like she could fly into a million pieces. With regard to that comfort zone--her room and the dolls and keepsakes in it--she's a little, um, OCD. But then she meets Will, a down-to-earth kid from the suburbs with family problems of his own. Through his kindness, their sweet relationship blooms slowly and nudges her toward a revelation about her family that was a long time in coming. Don't be surprised if you're sorry to leave Giselle's world by the book's end--not because it's so perfect, but because it's so real.