Although Varley O’Conner calls this a novel, it reads like a biography of ballet dancer Tanaquil LeClerque. George Balanchine, world famous dancer and choreographer, made her into a star, and designed ballets for her. She became his 5th wife. At the height of her career she contracted polio and was paralyzed from the waist down.
O’Conner’s descriptions of what LeClerq went through, her time in an iron lung, the painful exercises she endured, and life at the rehabilitation center in Warm Springs, Georgia, are moving and powerful. Balanchine took good care of her, but eventually his life with the Ballet and other dancers drew him away from their marriage, though they never divorced. And Tanaquil, from her wheelchair, became a teacher who inspired a new generation of young dance students.
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