Review: dancergirl (WiHi series #1)
dancergirl by Carol M. Tanzman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Carol M. Tanzman's dancergirl (WiHi series, #1) is an imperfect, but compelling start to a series of thriller/romance novels set in a Brooklyn high school.
Ali loves to dance. She works at a dance studio after school so that she can take classes for free, and in whatever spare time she has, she spends with her friend Jacy (a male friend, but not that way.) One night, Ali is dancing at a party and Charlie, (aka the school's Quentin Tarantino wannabe) asks Ali to help him make a video. So she dances for him, he uploads the video to a social media video site, and it goes viral. Initially, Ali enjoys her 15 minutes of fame, but things get weird when she gets the feeling she's being watched all the time. Jacy also disappears for weeks and doesn't explain why. Ali needs to figure out who is stalking her before her life spins completely out of control, but with what feels like the whole world watching, anyone could have eyes on her.
Ali and Jacy are fun characters and I thought Tanzman really got the dance studio culture down. She also does a good job expressing a teen's perceptions of tensions between the adults around them. dancergirl would have been even better if the pacing moved quicker and if we had more clues from the start to figure out the identity of Ali's stalker. That part seemed kind of tacked on, like, "We have to pick somebody so I guess it's this person."