Flight of the Dancer
Intense, perceptive and self-doubting, Julia Glass yearns to disentangle the threads of sadness from her troubled relationship with her mother, dead now for many years. She retraces her her adolescence and revisits her young self as a talented ballet dancer with a bright future along with the compromises she must make. She learns how to manipulate her body as a tool of retaliation against her imperious mother, all while sabotaging her own best interests.
At university, Julia falls in love with Steven, a brilliant student, who overwhelms her with his dazzling intellect. Coerced by her mother into an early marriage, she follows her husband to London, and begins the process of unraveling the complex bond with her mother and her fraught relationship with her body.
This is a transformative journey about the indelible bond between mother and daughter and how memory, uninvited, continuously casts its shadows into the present.
By turns gently humourous, raw and painful, Flight of the Dancer is a poignant coming-of-age portrait of agency and acceptance.
