SuitabookYou in five acts
Una LaMarche
- Reading
- Because the story includes several narrators and an undisclosed tragedy, pause after major changes to compare what each friend wants and understands. Discuss body image and racial exclusion in ballet separately from the romantic plot.
- Themes
- Friendship under pressure: Five friends face changing ambitions and the end of their time together, while a tragedy tests whether their friendship can survive. The book does not clearly resolve its stance on this.
- Ambition and artistic identity: The teenagers attend a prestigious performing-arts school and pursue ambitions that shift under the pressure of their final school year. The book leaves its stance open to more than one reading.
- Race, body image and access to ballet: Joy, a Black ballerina, faces body shaming and indignities linked to a ballet world described as largely closed to Black women. The treatment is socially critical: exclusion and body shaming are presented as obstacles rather than as neutral features of the institution.
- Worth knowing
- Expect emotionally heightened material involving heartbreak, betrayal, body shaming, racial barriers in ballet and a tragedy that changes the friends’ lives. The ending and the precise nature of these events remain unclear.