Review of the "Winner" by Erin Bomboy

Characters

There are really only two major characters in this book. Erin did a great job making us care for both the protagonist Carly and her co-protagonist Nina, through a novel told in alternating first person point-of-views. First, readers will empathise with Carly: helping her fourteen-year-old low functioning autistic brother. Then, we learn that for Nina, who is initially Carly's Standard dance teacher, injuries and age will prevent her from ever competing again. Who will the reader root for? Carly or Nina?

Plot

When Carly steps into "The Vernon and Irene Castle School of Ballroom Dancing," she only wants to teach dance basics to wedding couples. Little did she know that she will end up partnering with the three time ex-national champion Trey Devereux to compete in the US National.

When Nina breaks up with Oleg, her dance partner, it seems that she will not be able to fulfil her life long dream (and her mother's dream) of competing in the Nationals. She didn't expect to meet Jorge Gonzalez, a poor kid from the Bronx, the son of a cleaning lady and a low-level drug dealer who was serving a prison sentence. Jorge was the Latin Rising Star champion. They partnered to compete for the Standard category of the US National.

When Carly competed against Nina, who will win? Without giving any spoilers away, I'll just say that the ending is satisfying, because it highlights the importance of the process rather than the endpoint. "We danced our best and we tried our hardest, but it was the doing rather than the winning that mattered because life, like dance, requires saying yes to the invitation. Step in to step out." As a competitive dancer, a reader, a novelist and a person, this resonates with me.

The storytelling is made interesting because of the contrasting approaches to dance adopted by these two couples. Trey and Carly's ethos distilled dance into an abstract form, whereas Jorge and Nina's routine has been choreographed with a narrative in mind, like what people do in show dances.

Realism

As a competitive ballroom dancer myself, I love technical passages made fun like these:

"Waltz swirls and Tango stalks. Foxtrot is jaunty while Viennese Waltz is a whirlwind with all those rotations."

"You're going to make a Standard dancer out of me yet," Jorge said as he danced through the closed section of Foxtrot by himself: Feather Step, Reverse Turn, Three Step. Travel Diagonally to Center, rotate three-quarters, travel Diagonally to Wall, an elegant four bars of skimming across the floor akin to an ice skating sequence...

And, portrayal of some of the oddities in dance competitions:

"Papa continued to drop by our practices. Afterward, he'd throw us a couple of suggestions...I don't know if this was ethical, but as Chairman of the Judges, Papa knew the rulebook inside an out. We weren't exchanging money for his services and he wasn't on the dance floor judging us, so it could be chalked up to friendly interest on his part..."

The Russian Invasion in the US dance scene in the late 90s:

"Oleg and I, the original Russkis, had started in our teens. We were gifted and hardworking enough to rise high in the United States where Standard failed to excite with its picky technique and old-fashioned formality.

But confronted with these Eastern European youths who'd started as tots, chipping away at bad habits to arrive in young adulthood ready to soar, Oleg an I stumbled."

In the author's notes, Erin said, "my goal was to evoke but not represent the world of competitive ballroom dancing. I stayed as true as I could to the physical experience of dancing, mine as well as those alongside whom I danced, with the caveat that words can never capture nor reveal embodied sensation..."

Well, I think you've done a fine job!

What do you think? Let's talk about it.