Review: Under Winter Lights: Part One

Under Winter Lights: Part One by Bree M. Lewandowski
My rating: 3.75 of 5 stars

3.75 Stars

As most of my readers know, I typically don't read in the romance genre. So I was a little caught off-guard when author Bree Lewandowski asked me if I would review her book. After reading through its summary, my interest was piqued because it is set in the world of a fictional ballet company, The Bellus Ballet, which seems somewhat loosely based on The Joffrey Ballet. My mother was a ballet dancer who trained with a Russian ballet master before she married. I was raised attending performances and watching Russian films of the Bolshoi and Kirov (Mariinsky) Ballet. In my childhood, all our kitties were named after Russian ballerinas- Maya, Galina, Natalia, and Ekaterina. Ballet feels warm and familiar. So I accepted the review request.

First things first, let's get it out of the way, since the book is titled Under Winter Lights, Part 1: let me assure the readers that hate them that there isn't a cliffhanger here. Think of this as a ballet in two acts. This book is Act 1.

Set in Chicago, Under Winter Lights details a sometimes frustratingly tentative and unsure of herself protagonist, Martina Mariposa (the surname being the Spanish word for 'butterfly' but we have no idea about this redhead's Latin origins), age nineteen. Martina was brave enough to move away from home and join The Bellus Ballet but is so timid about so many things that at times it was hard to envision how she got to where she is. I tried to make peace with that thought by thinking that Martina isn't sure, either. The other main character is her dashing dance partner, Maraav Levondovska (whose first name is the Hebrew for West and whose last name is mostly Ukrainian or Polish and appears to be a feminine rather than masculine form of a surname, and whose parents are Laine and Bruce Levondovska and yeah, Bruce is clearly not a Russian name either so like Elsa in Frozen, let's let it go about names already) who is about twenty-four or twenty-five. Young Martina has been elevated from a young and relatively inexperienced corps de ballet dancer to principal dancer in a production of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker because of the desire on the part of unpleasant Bellus Ballet director Alan Jung to cast an innocent and childlike dancer in the role of Clara Silberhaus (Clara Stahlbaum in the original ballet). When questioned about Martina's ability to rise to this challenge, Jung seems to relish the idea of his formative role in developing her as a principal dancer. Or, as Jung so pleasantly puts it at one point during a media event, "It's as if, before her entrance into The Bellus, she did not exist." Jung has to be every reader's least favorite character, and in a dark backstory about a prior dancer he elevated, the ill-fated Daisy, we learn that he is without scruples or empathy. I was quite put off by this believably egotistical and Svengali-like character. For a brief moment I was worried that there would be a love triangle here, with this predatory director, but thus far that's not been fully realized. (And thank goodness. In the Harvey Weinstein era, this creepy man is all too real.)

Although we see a lush amount of detail about the ballet world from Martina's perspective, the novel's focus remains tightly bound to Martina and Maraav. The evolving relationship between Martina and Maraav is built out nicely by Lewandowski. Maraav, whose moniker "The Wolf of the Mariinsky" has provided him with the handy insulation of not true in reality bad-boy reputation, is actually a charming character. Maraav also has a fair amount of insight into self-worth and how to get some. Lewandowski spends more time building out Maraav's history than she does building out a backstory for Martina. While I'm sure she means to contrast the simple origins of Martina with the complex ones of Maraav, I was sometimes left feeling she lavished more writing love on Maraav than on her heroine. Lewandowski is also a little too prone to the telling us, instead of showing us, style of writing. But the story she builds is interesting enough to keep the reader reading.

I found much to like in this book. Lewandowski's love of the city of Chicago, and of ballet, is woven through this book wonderfully. Her depiction of Martina's loneliness, especially over a bitterly cold Thanksgiving day, is genuine and poignant. Lewandowski has given me enough enjoyment so that I'm planning to follow up with Part 2 over the holidays.

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