In a year stuffed to the brim with ballet fodder good, bad, and polarizing, Howrey’s latest novel stood above the rest as a poignant, searing, and rightly conflicted account of ballet’s past and present. Howrey, a former Joffrey Ballet dancer, constructs sentences and passages like only a true artist can, reflecting the pain and glory her characters feel. She masterfully choreographed her fictional world in a way that revived my own belief that art, whether in the discipline of dance or writing, can heal us—even when that art form is, itself, broken. –Emily Leibert