Dancing with Butterflies: A Novel [Paperback]

Dancing with Butterfliesuses the alternating voices of four very different women whose lives interconnect through a common passion for their Mexican heritage and a dance company called Alegría. Yesenia, who founded Alegría with her husband, Eduardo, sabotages her own efforts to remain a vital, vibrant woman when she travels back and forth across the Mexican border for cheap plastic surgery. Elena, grief stricken by the death of her only child and the end of her marriage, finds herself falling dangerously in love with one of her underage students. Elena's sister, Adriana, wears the wounds of abandonment by a dys-functional family and becomes unable to discern love from abuse. Soledad, the sweet-tempered illegal immigrant who designs costumes for Alegría, finds herself stuck back in Mexico, where she returns to see her dying grandmother.

Reyna Grande has brought these fictional characters so convincingly to life that readers will imagine they know them.Dancing with Butterflies

CHAPTER ONE

A dancer, more than any other human being, dies two deaths: the first, the physical when the powerfully trained body will no longer respond as you would wish.

—MARTHA GRAHAM

THIS is what it comes down to.

The sweat. The blisters on your feet. The aching of your arms from practicing the skirtwork. The hours and hours rehearsing the same song until the music buries itself so deeply in your brain youhear it even in your sleep. The constant need to coax your body to move past the hurt, the frustration, the exhaustion, and convince it that it can do more . . .

All that is worth this moment.

To be up here onstage, bathed in the red, blue, and yellow stage lights. A thousand eyl³$