Bright Burning Stars

"Addictive, angst-y, and heartfelt.” —Kirkus Reviews

"Bright Burning Stars is the compulsively readable story. I was breathless and battling tears up until the very last stunning turns onstage and beyond. A dazzling, heart-wrenching debut.” —Nova Ren Suma, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Walls Around Us

Best friends Marine Duval and Kate Sanders have trained at the Paris Opera Ballet School since childhood, where they’ve formed an inseparable bond forged by respective family tragedies and a fierce love for dance. When the body of a student is found in the dorms just before the start of their final year, Marine and Kate begin to ask themselves what they would do to win the ultimate prize: to be the one girl selected to join the Opera’s prestigious corps de ballet. Would they die? Cheat? Seduce the most talented boy in the school, dubbed the Demigod, hoping his magic would make them shine, too? Neither girl is sure.

But then Kate gets closer to the Demigod, even as Marine has begun to capture his heart. And as selection day draws near, the competition – for the prize, for the Demigod – becomes fiercer, and Marine and Kate realise they have everything to lose, including each other.

In Bright Burning Stars, debut author A. K. Small pens a stunning, propulsive story about girls at their physical and emotional extremes, the gutting power of first love, and what it means to fight for your dreams.

“" Debut author Small, herself a dancer, brings authenticity (fascinating day-to-day details abound) to what it takes to flourish or wither amid the soaring highs and crushing lows of a competitive dance school while sensitively exploring the girls' many emotional and physical extremes... Addictive, angst-y, and heartfelt." -- Kirkus Reviews "The fascinating, competitive ballet world may get the YA novel it deserves with Bright Burning Stars , a hyped debut set to publish next year . . . Pitched as an immersive, propulsive story into the world of ballet, Bright Burning Stars is also notable for the way it tackles sensitive topics such as mental illness and eating disorders." -- Entertainment Weekly”

“A.K. Small’s debut novel, Bright Burning Stars, is basically YA catnip . . . Small’s attention to detail—the minutiae of Marine and Kate’s lives in the academy—is beautifully written, and both the propulsion of the drama between Marine and Kate and their own demons make this book compulsively readable. Small only leaves you wanting more from her ballet-focused world.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Cutthroat ballerinas duking it out really never gets old.”
—Cosmopolitan

“With prose that is otherworldly at times, Small captures the disintegration of a friendship within a high-pressure world. A cerebral debut that will appeal to readers—and there are more than a few—interested in the cutthroat ballet universe.”
—Booklist

“Debut author Small, herself a dancer, brings authenticity (fascinating day-to-day details abound) to what it takes to flourish or wither amid the soaring highs and crushing lows of a competitive dance school while sensitively exploring the girls’ many emotional and physical extremes . . . Addictive, angst-y, and heartfelt.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Small, a trained ballerina, infuses her novel with dance terminology and French phrases, giving the reader a sense of the milieu. And while much of the focus of this novel is dance, the heart of the story is about the lengths one will go to realize a dream.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A fascinating and dramatic view of the world of young ballet dancers.”
—Pittsburgh City Paper

“This is a story filled with interesting plot twists sure to maintain a high level of interest for readers.”
—School Library Journal

A.K. Small was born in Paris. At five years old, she began studying classical dance with the legendary Max Bozzoni, then later with Daniel Franck and Monique Arabian at the famous Académie Chaptal. At thirteen, she moved to the United States where she danced with the Pacific Northwest Ballet for one summer in Seattle and with the Richmond Ballet Student Company for several years. She’s a graduate of the College of William and Mary and has an MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. When she’s not writing, she spends time with her husband, her puppy, and her three daughters, and practices yoga. Bright Burning Stars is her first novel.

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