... [a] beautifully dark suspense novel ... The Turnout submerses readers in the obsessive, toxic world of competitive ballet. Abbott perfectly describes the unique smells and atmosphere of a dance studio: a mix of sweat, vomit and hormones ... Abbott layers dread and darkness...keeps the twists coming until the final pages. The Turnout is the kind of gripping, unnerving page turner we have come to expect from an author who does noir better than almost anyone.
Desire and ballet are entwined in a smoldering pas de deux throughout this tightly choreographed thriller ... Anyone who has ever attended a performance of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet will enjoy the myriad references to Dewdrops, Snowflakes, mice and toy soldiers as the novel whirls along ... Abbott’s interpretation of Clara/Marie as an adolescent riven by erotic awakenings is cleverly based on Hoffmann’s story ... At times, the plot’s inevitable murder, sexual intrigue and family secrets seem almost incidental to the auditions and rehearsals, the bickering dancers and complaining parents, the punishing toe shoes and pulled muscles. Though it’s soon apparent that The Turnout is as much about female rage, jealousy and sexual desire as it is a suspense novel set in a dance studio.
... dark and juicy and tinged with horror ... while indeed she works with mystery and suspense and draws on noir and Gothic tropes, her goal seems less to construct intricate, double-crossing plot problems than to explore the dark side of femininity. Her prose is often incantatory, her dialogue lightly stylized. Frequently her tone has a strong flavor, pungent and fermented ... a bit of gore, but its deepest preoccupation is with bodies and sex ... the novel is so relentlessly saturated with sexual imagery and innuendo that at times it can feel like too much ... I found myself wondering if a dancer reading The Turnout might be made to feel uncomfortable, even stripped of some dignity ... while the narration sometimes feels omniscient, the story is refracted through one particular lens: Dara’s. Her consciousness is given to the reader impressionistically ... The Turnout revels in its own bigness, its drama, its relish for cataclysmic passion and its appetite for the grotesque, but some of Abbott’s deftest work involves an underlying interplay between strength and fragility.
Megan Abbott’s take on the world of ballet is anything but sugar coated. Instead, prepare yourself for a story told with such dark intensity that you feel as if you’re reading it under the covers by sputtering torchlight. A sense of brooding menace and cloying claustrophobia exudes from the pages ... Where The Turnout falls down for me is in the characterisations. Dara, Marie and Charlie are all beautifully rendered, but try as I might I could not warm to any of them. It’s a writing tactic that definitely keeps readers on their toes—no pun—but I was longing to find someone to root for in all of the madness and mayhem that ensues. There is precious little light to be found as Abbott plumbs the depths of relationships, love and sibling rivalry to an at times uncomfortable degree. The Turnout is twisted and unsettling, and turns the spotlight into a behind the scenes world that many will know nothing about.
Megan Abbott’s provocative, absorbing novels pull back the curtain on worlds we don’t often think of as insular, but are hotbeds of unchecked ambition, anxiety, competition, love and hate, despair and joy ... Abbott invests The Turnout with emotion as she explores the Durants, who have found ballet to be their freedom and their cage ... Abbott continues her high standards in the enthralling The Turnout.
From the beginning of The Turnout, she establishes a mood of conflict, tension and illicit desire, creating disquieting parallels between ballet and a girl’s emerging sexuality ... I’m ambivalent about The Turnout It is atmospheric, suspenseful and full of marvelously juicy behind-the-scenes details. But because I feel proprietary about ballet, I was sometimes bothered by the slightly lurid portrait it presents. I wanted to feel Abbott’s affection for the art.
This claustrophobic, psychosexual look at people whose lives are governed by deception is one of the best Gothic takes on modern ballet I’ve ever enjoyed ... Megan Abbott’s absorbing novel doesn’t shy away from the self-torture or often catty competitiveness that plague a performer’s life; her book does, in fact, lean into the trope of dancers being weird at sex, as the most modern slang usage of the title implies. Unlike the movie, however, at no point does The Turnout diminish its characters or turn them into flat cardboard cutouts for readers to feel smugly superior to. Dara, Marie, and Charlie are all deeply flawed human beings, but the book explains why while entangling them in the kind of investigative scrutiny they’ve been raised to avoid ... Despite this insistence on opaqueness, The Turnout does a really terrific job of showing off and explaining the obsessive nature of ballet culture and how damaged people don’t just spring from a vacuum ... Ms. Abbott’s writing is both darkly atmospheric and unrelenting in its near-surgical dissection of ballet and desire, plunging the reader past the delicately glamorous facade of a career performer’s life into the nasty, pain-ridden longing that can fester at the heart of it.
Megan Abbott, unparalleled anatomist of the harm girls do to themselves and each other in pursuit of a physical ideal, has turned her unsparing gaze...to ballet ... unsettling ... How the Durants handle the reckoning they’ve deferred until reality almost blows their house down makes for a shattering, mesmerizing novel that transcends genre.
... a blood-red horror story. Meantime, the Durants’ own family romance, recollected in the heat of current events, proves a grimmer fable than is usually recounted ... Ms. Abbott’s prose has never been more impressive than in this whirlpool of psychological suspense, shocking images, well-wrought metaphors—and one final twist that rattles like a serpent’s tail in Eden.
...it makes complete sense that Abbott turns her attention to another feminine pressure-cooker, the ballet school, in her new novel The Turnout. Certainly anyone who has danced classical ballet...knows what’s coming: the juxtaposition of elegant, gauzy, seemingly effortless beauty on stage with the ugly, punishing hard work behind the scenes ... With the entire book filtered through Dara’s point of view, as a questionable decision early in the novel spirals into an ever-worsening situation for all three of the main characters, you’re likely to read with your shoulders up around your ears, full of tension and dread. When the crime finally comes at last, it’s almost a relief ... the writing is rich with Abbott’s trademark detail, focusing in on the tendrils of hair escaping from a young student’s bun, the dramatic importance of the color of a dancer’s rehearsal tights, the brutal strain that looking so elegant puts on a young body constantly pushed to its limits ... The Turnout is a page-turner, suffused with dread even when the scene being described involves doing paperwork with a contractor. Abbott’s work here shows off the talents she’s become known for: for twisting the knife, for forcing characters to reckon with their unsavory pasts, for writing about sexual longing in a way that’s more unsettling than sensual, for plunging us so deep into unfamiliar environments they feel utterly familiar by the final page.
Even if we don't always like Dara, who has internalized the worst of her mother's ideas, we sympathize with her desire to discover the truth and free herself from her mother's legacy ... Because Derek's such a buffoon, it's fun to watch the ease with which he gets the best of Dara. Brash, vulgar, leery, he's a comic villain—until it seems he might not be the villain ... a slow burn. After a long wait, when violence comes, it seems that much more arresting. Were Abbott not so accomplished, we might tire of reading before the stakes become clear. But from the first page to the reveal at the end, a palpable sense of menace and the sympathy we feel for Dara as her world unravels make it impossible to look away.
Abbott's prose can lean toward high drama worthy of Tchaikovsky (occasionally to its detriment), and the sisters' distorted psyches, unnaturally directed from their infancy toward an uncompromising art form, are rightly examined more in their dark depths than they are portrayed with excessive nuance ... The novel's greatest triumph is truly in its vivid, unforgettable setting. Abbott is a master of atmosphere, and in the blood, sweat, tears, bruises, ripped toenails, broken bones, rivalries, desires, and tutu-pink dreams that fill the studio throughout Nutcracker season, she creates a world of almost unbearable tension, pirouetting ever further into darkness.
The Turnout is a dance that begins slowly and lures the reader in – Abbott’s writing is razor sharp, offering a precise dissection of complex relationships, sheltered family, sexuality and secrets. Within the beauty of these dancers’ lives is a darkness left to be peeled, layer by layer, until the dying pages. Ominous and unsettling, The Turnout drives the reader to seek answers.
Abbott...has a top-notch ability to reveal the dark undercurrents of women's relationships and sexuality. Her taut, unsettling writing creates tension through the slightest actions and phrases, and keeps the pages turning. This is clever, chilling psychological suspense at its best.
... [a] multifaceted story ... Abbott brilliantly explores the psychosexual undercurrents throbbing throughout this haunting novel, from the dancers’ pointe shoes, 'pink satin fantasies we beat into submission,' through even The Nutcracker itself, 'a young girl’s dream of peering over the precipice into the dark furrow of adulthood.'
The physicality in Abbott’s prose gives the mounting tension a heartbeat ... While the life of a ballerina may be 'mysterious and private,' many illusions are shattered by the end. Though this story lacks some of the unquenchable energy that is Abbott’s trademark, the mesmerizing prose will keep you turning the pages. Abbott is a master of thinly veiled secrets often kept by women who rage underneath their delicate exteriors.
... gut-punching noir ... Abbott is pitch-perfect at making the sisters’ complex dynamic and mix of emotions plausible and painful, while capturing the competitiveness and cruelty of children’s ballet, where every young girl wishes to be the center of attention. This look at the darker side of the dance world demonstrates why Abbott has few peers at crafting moving stories of secrets and broken lives.
