But as Georgia learns more about the nature of her parents’ May-December relationship, and starts to think of people in terms of sex – who’s having it, who wants it, and with whom – the outside world seeps into her emotional fortress. Through ballet and its careful attention to the body’s mechanisms, she achieves autonomy she’s never found elsewhere. To this point, Georgia has coped by compartmentalizing her thoughts and feelings, and by focusing on physical discipline. Her father is a cold and disapproving neuro-psychiatrist, her mother a needy and sad professor, and her overprotective half-sister a student of critical theory at the University of Toronto. There, Georgia imagines, she’ll be free of their adolescent preoccupation with sex, which she finds disconcerting, as well as her emotionally unstable home life. She can’t wait to ditch her uncouth peers for the purity and purposefulness of freshman year at the Royal Toronto Ballet Academy. Georgia, the teenaged protagonist of Martha Schabas’s debut novel, is nearly out of middle school.
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