Collusion: Memoir of a Young Girl and Her Ballet Master

Yes, well written. Yes, somewhat disturbing. Yes, obsession. But, as far as memories can be accurate the best description of what a child is able to do to please an adult, how much a child is able to deny what we would call normal needs to reach a goal itself has the urge to reach. First it is perfection in ballet, perfect posture, perfect body control - pleasing herself. Then, with a strike of his cane her ballet master claims her, and so there comes a shift - he becomes the center of her universe, starting an emotional bonding which excludes the rest of the world, also her family. Emotional needs can be as strong as hunger and thirst, and in fulfilling or denying an adult can do as much good and damage as with starving or overfeeding. Read and decide for yourself if this relationship was good or evil - or both.

I couldn't put this down - from the opening scene I was fascinated and locked in Evan's erotic spell. Collusion presents a more than plausible picture of the shape that female adolescent sexuality can take.

Evan Zimroth's touching and insightful memoir left this reader stunned and enlightened. It is one of the most honest personal revelations I have read, boldly honest and unwilling to cringe under or conform to what our sexually dysfunctional society says should be the "normal" response to what is told of in this book. Obviously, one should not read this book if one is afraid of hearing what a real girl thought about a very unusual and intimate relationship. It is not a story of prurient events; it is about the love this girl has for the discipline of ballet and for a dynamic and compelling man who initiated her into its world. Ms. Zimroth has unsparingly chronicled her growth of character during the two years of her tale, and tells a story that is at once tense, dramatic, frightening, exciting and uplifting. Her refusal to cast a sentimental pall over her childhood and these events certainly frightens those who cannot see the individual human being that is a child for all the treacle with which we sugar-coat the concept of childhood. This book is a template by which we can judge the ability of people to truly listen to other voices instead of running in fear from differing views. Despite the lip service paid to "inclusiveness" in liberal circles these days, some of the responses I have seen to this memoir indicate the degree to which that concept should include the label "but only to include that of which we approve." Finally, a note about hypocrisy. I couldn't help but think, while reading what is one of the most intense scenes in the book (when the young girl is punished by her mentor for smoking) that, was that punishment to be inflicted by a parent, most of us would not think twice. But from someone else? Horrors! Yet the dynamics of the event were no different than the countless physical punishments which parents inflict daily and unquestioningly (and, many times, rightly) on their own offspring. Children today exist only as slaves, owned by their parents and forced to obey the strictures of whatever -ism those around them feel they should be taught. We career from no discipline for children to subservience for them without ever thinking to teach them simple morals and ethics that respect them as individuals and take into account their need to grow through experience. (They certainly will not grow through coddling and protection from everything the world has to offer, only to thrust them out unready and frightened into harsh reality when they turn eighteen.) The horror some adults feel at the child who can think for and desire for herself is evident in the very parents who spend so much time praising children as pure, unsullied angels. Those of us who remember our childhoods well, as Ms. Zimroth does, know better. This book deserves huge success. Congratulations and thanks to Evan Zimroth for having the courage to tell us this remarkable story.

Except for going to occasional performances of Swan Lake, I knew nothing about ballet or ballet life. This is a sexy, scary, fascinating memoir of a girl's life. She is as totally inside a ballet school as a novice might be inside a convent. I learned a lot about the life and also about ballet technique, but what I liked best was her own personal emotional reactions, especially refracted as memories by her grown-up self.

COLLUSION SHOWS US HOW A DETERMINED PERSON CAN DO IN ORDER TO REACH HIS DREAM. IN THIS CASE, EVAN FAILED BECAUSE SHE WAS TOO MUCH "TROUBLESOME".