EXCERPT | Lisa Lazarus's aching Flight of the Dancer is a poignant coming-of-age portrait

In Lisa Lazarus's Flight of the Dancer, Julia Glass yearns to disentangle the threads of sadness from her troubled relationship with her mother, dead now for many years. She retraces her adolescence and revisits her young self as a talented ballet dancer with a bright future, along with the  compromises she must make. Coerced by her mother into an early marriage, she begins the process of unravelling the complex bond with her mother and her fraught relationship with her body. This is a transformative journey about how memory, uninvited, continuously casts its shadows into the present. By turns gently humorous, raw and painful, Flight of the Dancer is a poignant coming-of-age portrait of agency and acceptance.

Here is the first chapter of the novel.