The Turnout by Megan Abbott

​      Megan Abbott made a very good first impression with You Will Know Me. It was exactly  the sort of book I like, dark psychological fiction, where drama rules and crime thrills. So I was excited to read this one, her latest. Excited…and then disappointed.
     What didn’t work here and worked so well in the other book? This was, after all, a novel very much in a similar mold. A dark and heavy family drama with a dead body and a surprise twist in the end. But that’s the forest of it all and it was the trees that failed here. All those details…
     The basic plot revolves around a family which itself revolves around ballet. And I can’t even begin to tell you how much ballet is in here, but…there’s so much freaking ballet in this book. It is, after all, the thing Durants live for. Well, the female Durants, anyway. Two girls brought up by their mother to dance, dance, dance…And now in their 30s with grotesquely mangled feet and limited experience otherwise, they have a ballet school. Marie and Dara and Dara’s beloved Charlie, also a ballet dancer and their mother’s once upon a time trainee, until his body gave out on him and now he just handles the administrative side of things. It’s a weird sort of ménage à trois, but they make it work.
       Until a fire in their studio brings a construction man into their lives and all their dreams and nightmares come true.
       If that seems hyperbolic, wait till you meet this guy. This aged out Fabio described as having the build of an athlete gone to seed with too tight shirts and natty boots apparently is so irresistible to women that they will throw their entire lives away just for a chance to be with him. This literary creation is so over the top, it’s laughable. Who knew they even wrote characters like that outside of cheap romance paperbacks. The disparity is especially glaring in contrast with all the other realistic traumatized individuals in the book.
     And so this guy, every women’s wet dream and everyone’s who’s ever needed repairs worst nightmare, who seems to embody an overpowering masculinity and really horrible levels of professionalism comes into the sisters’ lives and their dance studio like a tsunami and does terrible things and it’s down to Dara to sort it out because Marie is quite literally useless and Charlie isn’t far from that either.
       And meanwhile, dark highly predictable family secrets will be revealed and, of course, there will be ballet. So much ballet.
      The thing is its difficult to outright dislike this book, because Abbott is such an obviously good writer. But aside from writing, this was kind of tedious. The characters ranged from unlikeable to unrealistic, the pacing was slow and had a strangely dreamy quality to it, possibly meant to emulate the sisters’ mindsets. The only thing really right about this novel was the way the author ratcheted up the unease as the situation with the construction Fabio took darker and darker turns. That had an eerie claustrophobic flavor that went very well with the dark psychological themes. But overall, unless you’re really, really into ballet or really, really have a bias against construction workers and deem them all evil manipulative conniving liars and cheats…there’s not much here to recommend itself.
     Unless…wait…have you ever been wanting to read a romance fantasy about a very, very, very manly construction worker and his exuberant sexual potency, but you’re just too classy to read cheap romance? Cause if so, you’ll love this. Otherwise, pass. Thanks Netgalley.