What's Hot? Books.

dancergirl by Carol Tanzman. 

Title: dancergirl
Author: Carol M Tanzman
Genre: Young Adult
Publisher: Harlequin
Publication Date: Novermber 15th 2011
Goodreads Summary: Ever feel like someone's watching you? Me, too. But lately it's been happening in my room.
When I'm alone.

A friend posted a video of me dancing online, and now I'm no longer Alicia Ruffino. I'm dancergirl. And suddenly it's like me against the world.— everyone's got opinions.

My admirers want more, the haters hate, my best friend Jacy,— even he's acting weird. And some stalker isn't content to just watch anymore.

Ali. Dancergirl. Whatever you know me as, however you've seen me online, I've trained my whole life to be the best dancer I can be. But if someone watching has their way, I could lose way more than just my love of dancing. I could lose my life.

{ Review }

Just in case you were wondering, I haven't forgotten how to use the Caps lock button, the title of this book is just in small letters. Speaking of the title, it really irritates me when books have titles such as this one because I'm a grammar freak and it just doesn't look right even though it makes sense in the context of the book.

Judging from the title, you'd think that this was a story all about a girl who dances, but it's actually so much more than that. I wasn't prepared for a creepy stalker story at all and I was really surprised by how creeped out I was by the some events in this book. This story is filled with suspense, right from the beginning to the end and you have absolutely no idea what's going to happen next. There were several points whilst reading that I convinced myself that I knew what was coming and that I knew who the stalker was, but then something would happen to completely change everything I thought I knew and I was right back to square one.

It's written from the first perspective so you read all of Ali's thoughts which made everything more dramatic because life is pretty damn scary from the point of view of the stalkee. I wasn't particularly fond of any of the characters in this book, Ali included, however, I do think that the writing was pretty good. I could feel all of Ali's panic and that drew me into the action of the book and made my heart pound alongside hers.

I didn't particularly like the bits in this book that were about dancing. I didn't feel like there was any real emotional connection in those pages and being a dancer myself it lacked the magic I was hoping for. On the plus side, the creepy, stalker parts of the book were excellent and instilled a real sense of fear in me. The parts of the book that involved friendship or love weren't particularly interesting and the first part of the novel is largely preoccupied with these themes so it can take a while to get into the good stuff.

On the whole, I found this book to be pretty average. There are lots of twists and turns towards the end and the suspense really keeps you on your toes; however, I just wasn't that taken with this book. I'm not a particularly big fan of suspense novels and yet those bits were favourite parts of the book which must show something. Despite being titled 'dancergirl', the parts to do with dancing were my least favourite so I think there was something slightly amiss here. If you're a fan of young adult suspense novels then by all means give this a try but I don't think this book is anything to rave about.