Booklist: When Penelope Sparrow wakes up in the hospital, she’s told she fell 14 stories and is lucky to be alive. But with bruises and pain and a broken bone, Penny faces the possibility of life without dance. All Penny ever wanted was to be a dancer, but her five-foot, eight-inch stature and wide hips (despite a lifetime of eating just enough “to stay on the right side” of anorexia) meant rejection from the traditional five-foot, five-inch and 95-pound-worshiping dance world. Penny slowly pieces together the fragments of what happened that night on the balcony—and how it relates to her former, and complex, relationship with famed dancer Dmitri. Deepening relationships with Angela, a cystic fibrosis-sufferer; Marty, a baker; Bebe, her former mentor; and others carry Penny along as she comes to reevaluate what it means to live, love, and accept less than perfection. Craft, a former dancer and choreographer, captures the entanglement of pain and despair and beauty and hope that often knits our lives and, through the character of Penny, illustrates how self-acceptance is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
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