Review: Audition

Audition by Stasia Ward Kehoe

Publisher: Viking Juvenile
Published: October 13th 2011
Pages: 458
Source: Library
Genre: Contemporary
Goodreads

When high school junior Sara wins a coveted scholarship to study ballet, she must sacrifice everything for her new life as a professional dancer-in-training. Living in a strange city with a host family, she's deeply lonely-until she falls into the arms of Remington, a choreographer in his early twenties. At first, she loves being Rem's muse, but as she discovers a surprising passion for writing, she begins to question whether she's chosen the right path. Is Rem using her, or is it the other way around? And is dancing still her dream, or does she need something more? This debut novel in verse is as intense and romantic as it is eloquent.

Audition is the first book I have ever read in verse, so when I began to read (I admit, I didn't know at first that the book was in verse until I began to read) I wasn't sure how much I would actually get of the story, nor how much story there would be at all. Some parts of this book I quite liked, while others were harder to enjoy in this story.

Audition tells Sara's story as she goes from small town dancer to a more advanced school in another state, away from her family and everything she has ever known. The book follows Sara as she discovers the difficulties of becoming a ballerina, as well as the drama of being a teen in a new city.  

I though it was really interesting reading a story in verse. I really liked how I easily I understood the story in shorter lines and with a flow that really fit the story. It was very beautiful how the story flowed like the dancers it was telling the story of. I loved how this story was put together to put dance to words. Describing something so hard to describe takes a lot of work, and how it was done it verse worked out perfectly to describe the movement and emotions of dance.

I had a lot of trouble connecting with the main character, as well as the other characters in the book. Audition is extremely emotion and description based, and the characters felt like an afterthought in the story. I really did  not empathize with Sara, the main character, nor did I feel like she had depth to her other than her ability to do as others said. None of there characters really had a significant part in the story otherwise.

This book is really depressing. It just it. Sara gets in a really bad relationship in this story, and that on top of all the stress of dance, school, and the fact that Sara is in a new city living away from her family makes this book just really sad overall. I really didn't like that there really wasn't one happy moment in the book, it was the same feelings straight through.

Overall I didn't really like Audition very much. It really just wasn't a story for me, but I think that other people could very well have a very different opinion.