Nora Roberts– Reflections and Dreams

I love ballet.  At the rock gym, I tend to be the girl getting funny looks as I do pliés and point my toes while stretching. As someone with a life-long love of dance and happy endings alike, I find myself falling in love with Nora Robert’s Reflections and Dreams, which contains two of my favourite stories– Reflections and Dance of Dreams.

For me, Nora Roberts is one of the authors that I can consistently turn to for a wonderful escape from the real world.  I love immersing myself in a place where I know problems will be resolved, where you know the ending already, and where the journey is the real focus.  I’ve read both books before, but when I saw a pristine copy at the Rockville Friends bookstore (for $1.50! Even with coupons, it would have been at least $6 at B&N), I had to have it.  The spine wasn’t even cracked yet! As someone who devours books, I can’t imagine having such a wonderful story and not reading it right away.

Dance of Dreams is one of my favourite books because it reveals glimpses of the world of dance in a manner accessible even to the uninitiated.  Seemingly mundane details, like the need to use new pointe shoes for each performance and the dancer’s life of constant classes and repetition of steps for perfomances, blend together seamlessly to create a portrait of a dancer’s life. Roberts is adept at forging details and the story’s core, consistently bringing depth, characterization, and passion to her tales. Ruth Bannion, the heroine, was introduced in Reflections, but her story is definitely strong enough to stand en pointe alone. She and Lindsay Dunne, the heroine and Ruth’s teacher in Reflections, both have physical and inner strength and understand themselves– as women, as dancers, and as partners. They’re not perfect, but the story is so much stronger for their flaws and their mis-steps as they reach for their dreams. As much as I enjoy bubble-gum romance, the fluffy stories where the heroine is innocent, naive, and has to be rescued by the hero, I fall for the stronger women, the ones in whom I can find aspects of myself.

I love the entire Stanislaski series, but these stories are la crème de la crème for me. Despite the overwrought descriptions on the back of the book, her characters leap from the page with believable life, intellegence, and passion. Lindsay and Ruth are wonderful women that you feel you could like in real life, too, and their partners in life are just that– men who can and do let them stand on their own, but are there to support them when they need it. Reflections and Dreams is definitely a go-to book when I’m craving my ballet fix and the happy-ending every fairy-tale should have.

Cassandra Powell, FOLMC Staff
January 13, 2009