Delphine and her friends Margaux and Lindsay are teenage ballet students who aspire to become members of the Paris Opera Ballet company and to someday become stars. Kapelke-Dale's first novel follows their progress toward this goal, moving backward and forward in time as it does. All three are gifted--more with their art than their lives, which are occasionally fraught. Delphine, for example, will fall in love first with Jacques, the company's star male dancer and, second, with Russian choreographer Dmitri, whom she will follow to St. Petersburg. There she will live as his lover and assistant choreographer, an experience that will stand her in good stead when, at age 36, she returns to Paris to undertake her dream project. Though sometimes coming dangerously close to soap opera and sporting an improbable ending, the novel is an unqualified success at portraying the demanding lives of ballerinas and of the men who, for better or worse, inhabit the ballet world. With its look behind the scenes of the ballet world and its appealing characters, The Ballerinas will be catnip for balletomanes.

Delphine, Lindsay, and Margaux danced together at the Paris Opera Ballet until Delphine departed for St. Petersburg for a brighter career, carrying with her a secret that could hurt her two friends. After 14 years, she's back to choreograph, hoping to repair her frayed bond with Lindsay and Margaux but surprised to learn how much her old world has changed. With a 250,000-copy first printing.

Kapelke-Dale (Graduates in Wonderland: The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults, with Jessica Pan) makes her fiction debut with a well-crafted thriller. When dancer Delphine returns to Paris after 13 years in Saint Petersburg to choreograph Tsarina for the Paris Opera Ballet, she desperately wants to reconnect with Margaux and Lindsay , her best friends from their ballet academy. Delphine has a secret, something she and Margaux did that ruined Lindsay's life 14 years earlier. Delphine casts soloist Lindsay in Tsarina's title role in an effort to make things right, but no matter how hard Delphine works, Tsarina falls apart. When Lindsay intentionally kicks her understudy in the face during rehearsals, Delphine is forced to fire her. To salvage the ballet, Delphine shifts her focus to Jock, an old flame playing the role of Rasputin. The more time Delphine spends with Jock, the more she realizes she and Margaux aren't the only ones with secrets, and a potential scandal threatens to destroy the Paris Opera Ballet. Kapelke-Dale nicely explores the power of female friendship, a woman's relationship with her body, and what it truly means to be seen. This one's for fans of Megan Abbott's The Turnout. (Dec.)