The Turnout by Megan Abbott

The Turnout by Megan Abbott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Publish Date: August 3rd, 2021

Review:

Sisters Marie and Dara, along with Dara's husband Charlie, grew up in ballet and are owners of the Durant School of Ballet, having inherited it from Marie and Dara's mother. Dara is the strong, stoic, unemotional sister; Marie is the younger, softer, emotional sister. Charlie was injured as a dancer and will never be able to practice ballet again, but brings balance to the family and the school is a thriving success until the night of the fire. 

After an accidental fire ravages the school, where Marie also lives in the attic, contractor Derek comes in with big dreams to renovate the school. The Nutcracker performance is just months away and the sisters plus Charlie have everything on the line, and they are counting on the renovation to go to plan. Of course, it doesn't; the tension between Derek, Marie, Dara, and Charlie grows until a life is lost.

For the first 75% of the book, there is mostly tension and a gothic, gritty atmosphere. Thanks to Abbott's talent at writing those exact kind of scenes, I was invested enough to continue reading. The last 25% of the book sped past and I was left with questions. 

I really wanted to enjoy this book, but I just didn't. I was unhappily hooked from the first page. Abbott excels at writing a tense, creepy scene, but in many of these scenes nothing happens, until too much happens. 

Quotes:

"It just…  happened and then other things happened and suddenly, everything was happening and there was no stopping it."

"Two people, tightly twined, can begin to convince themselves of anything. There’s reality and then there’s the shared experience, which feels so much more real."

No one wanted to face the truth. That every family was a hothouse, a swamp. Its own atmosphere, its own rules. Its own laws and gods. There would never be any understanding from the outside. There couldn’t be.

Spoilers:

For a book that started out so slow, there is a lot here. 

Derek, the contractor, is creepy from the start. He gives Dara (and the reader) a lot of disgusting, scary vibes. Soon the ballet school is taken over by the renovations, which will clearly not be completed in time for The Nutcracker. Even worse, Derek starts a relationship with Marie, which quickly morphs from a sex to coercive control, and Marie begins acting differently and spilling family secrets to Derek. Derek even discusses taking Dara and Charlie's house from them, as half the house belongs to Marie and she is under his control, and the family realizes all of the papers they've signed for Derek and just how much control they've given him. 

One night, Charlie confronts Derek in the ballet school. After Derek calls the family disgusting, alluding to things Marie has told them, Derek and Charlie tussle and Derek falls over the bannister of the staircase. Dara, Charlie, and Marie clean out the attic to make it appear as though Marie was living in the house the whole time, and they leave the school. The next morning, Charlie drives over, "finds" the body, and calls the police. 

At this point, we are at the 75% mark and then Abbott decides to really pack it in and jams the remainder of the book full of drama. 

The police initially seem to think Derek's death is an accident and the siblings + Charlie breath a sigh of relief until an insurance adjuster starts sniffing around. She seems to believe that it was a homicide. 

The reader learns that Mama Durant preyed on Charlie when he was barely a teenager attending the Durant School of Ballet. We learn that Mama Durant was inappropriate with everyone in her family, to put it mildly.

Then Dara learns that the woman who recommended Derek, Mrs. Bloom, had a relationship with Derek. Except she didn't actually recommend him to Charlie; she never would have, as Derek was very controlling of her but she was still enamored with him. 

Dara also learns that Charlie must've been the one to find Derek's name; but why lie about how he found the contractor? Through the insurance adjuster, Dara learns that Derek has a family. He has a wife. And his wife is a physical therapist. 

Charlie sees a physical therapist. 

We learn alongside Dara that Charlie has been cheating on his wife with the physical therapist, and that they fantasized this plot of Derek's death. 

Charlie then takes his own life, and takes the blame for Derek's death, taking the heat off the sisters. 

We then find out that the two siblings and Charlie had a polyamorous relationship until Marie moved out of the house. The ending finds the two sisters on the curb of their street, watching their house burn down as they say goodbye to all the wonderful and terrible memories. 

About the Author:

Megan Abbott is the Edgar®-winning author of the novels Die a Little, Queenpin, The Song Is You, Bury Me Deep, The End of Everything, Dare Me, The Fever, You Will Know Me and Give Me Your Hand.

Abbott is co-showrunner, writer and executive producer of DARE ME, the TV show adapated from her novel. She was also a staff writer on HBO's THE DEUCE. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Believer and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Born in the Detroit area, she graduated from the University of Michigan and received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University. She has taught at NYU, SUNY and the New School University and has served as the John Grisham Writer in Residence at The University of Mississippi.

She is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Street Was Mine: White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir, and the editor of A Hell of a Woman, an anthology of female crime fiction. She is currently developing two of her novels, Dare Me and The Fever, for television.