Dances is especially immersive and visceral, thanks to the raw first-person narration and a muscular prose style ... Happily, Cuffy also injects moments of dry humor. These are welcome interruptions in a story more about mood than plot.
Cuffy’s novel transcends familiar narratives about the fraught journey toward artistic distinction by exploring the toll of reaching the end of such a journey ... Cuffy skillfully places readers within the dancer’s body ... Through longer passages about dance that may overwhelm the layperson, Cuffy effectively externalizes the inner disfigurement of a woman unable to receive genuine affection, least of all from herself.
Cuffy’s debut is enriched by her deep knowledge of ballet, expressed in sentences that swoop, surge, and flow as if choreographed ... She also vividly creates the dancer’s inner world, with its extremes of discipline and self-consciousness.
... brilliant ... Through Cece’s trials, the story movingly explores the secrets and inner demons of a performer who struggles with artistic competition, betrayal, guilt, family, and "the ever-present weight" of her race.
