Customer Reviews

The Flamenco Academy: A Novel

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Not since Prosper Merimee has any novelist even begun to do justice to the world of flamenco, gypsies, and obsession with the passionate perfection that Sarah Bird applies to it here. This book, a beautifully truthful study of a skewed pairing and an entire way of being, brings both Merimee's Seville and his multiple themes into the new world and the present day, and only gains resonance and depth in the process. Instead of a smitten Don Jose, we have a poignant young woman who longs for her gypsy lover as much as she longs for the flamenco rhythms driving her heartbeat; instead of Carmen's betrayal, we have the duplicity of a painful friendship; instead of romantic Seville, we get both twentieth-century Spain AND contemporary Albuquerque. This brilliantly imagined, deeply felt, and well-crafted novel should be tops on everyone's summer reading list.

To do "The Flamenco Academy" justice one should dance a review, not write it. Not "one" as in me, because I can't dance. Sarah Bird's book deserves a more perfect homage than I can write, much less perform en compás, so to speak.

This is a book about obsession, sex, flamenco, gypsies, art, celebrity, broken families, the Spanish Civil War, and contemporary American life with all its brutal selfishness and redemptive possibilities of freedom. Most of all, like all great stories, it is about -- it lives in and is written from -- the human, all too human heart.

It's a romance, but it's a postmodern romance. That is, "Flamenco" is about anything but escape. It follows the first commandment of flamenco puro: give me the truth. I ached for young Rae, the Albuquerque teenage girl who falls deeply in love with the tortured musical prodigy, Tomás, after a single magical (and chaste) encounter. Hell, I ached for Tomás, too, and Didi, Rae's narcissistic friend. (Didi deserves a new literary category, neither protagonist nor two-dimensional antagonist, but, maybe, pantagonist.)

I was captivated by the cave-dwelling gypsies of the tales within the tale. They are ugly, earthy, carnal, lice-ridden angels who, perversly, remain pariahs and enemies-of-states because of their fierce beauty. Then there is Federico García Lorca, the martyred Spanish poet whose cameo in the book is written with a touch the poet himself would have admired.

Bird writes with a thoroughly contemporary sensibility. This is a romance, but it's not retro. Its daring reminds me of G.B. Edwards' "Book of Ebenezer LePage", which is handy, because the late novelist John Fowles described Edwards' book in words that fit Bird's accomplishment very well. Edwards' book risked "things that no trend-conscious novelist today would care to risk his reputation on, just as in some ways it had to stay resolutely old-fashioned and simple-tongued." Edwards' book was "an act of courage," Fowles said, and that's exactly what I think of Bird's "Flamenco Academy".

This book makes me want to dance.

When her family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, seventeen years old Cyndi Rae Hrncir feels like a stranger in a strange land as her Czech backgrounds sticks out. The loner soon suffers another blow when her father dies from cancer. Reputed "bad girl" Didi Steinberg suffers the same misfortune when her dad also dies from cancer. The paternal tragedies lead to the two disparate teens forging a special bond as they have no one to turn; both their moms are busy grieving..

After meeting rising flamenco playing guitarist Tomas Montenegro, Cyndi develops a passion for the music. She and Didi study under Tomas' legendary great aunt and guardian daunting Doña Carlota Anaya de Montenegro. As the two young females learn the demanding flamenco requirements, each makes a play for Tomas while also learning much about the Doca's past in war ravaged Spain.

This is a terrific contemporary tale that focuses on two intriguing scenarios. First the obvious romantic triangle between the students; this is well written and holds the audience attention as they wonder if friendships will end and who if either of the girls will gain the boy. However, even more interesting and refreshing is that the novel is the story of Doca; that grips the reader as few subplots can. Fans will appreciate this strong tale that pay homage to the art of flamenco music and dancing.

Harriet Klausner

I was so enthralled by this book! It has everything: great storytelling, fascinating sup-plot, wonderful characters, history brought to life, and such power to suck you right into the story that I couldn't stop reading it! The research that went into writing it makes Sarah Bird a master of getting her details just right yet never becoming pedantic.The depiction of obsession is so recognizable and compelling: for Flamenco and for the personal relationships of the two girls, both with each other and Tomas, the Gypsy guitarist.Sarah Bird is an awesome talent. I am telling all my friends to order it immediately!

Can one find in modern literature a character that has mathematics, love, and dance all packaged into one? In this story there is such a character, Cyndi Rae Hrncir, who traces out her worldline in Albuquerque, New Mexico, home of the `Flamenco Academy.' Sometimes this worldline is a random walk, and sometimes it is subjected to the strong perturbations of her "friend" Didi, but it also, and most delightfully, patterns itself to the staccato rhythms of flamenco, a dance that takes full advantage of gravity and acoustics, demanding attention from its audience, and an abundance of perspiration and bunions from its dancers.

Flamenco was to Rae at first a practical tool, a means to an end, a methodology by which she could get into the arms and bed of Tomas Montenegro, a handsome young guitarist, who holds Rae under a spell from the first night she sees him. But unwittingly, but totally expected from anyone who engages in the vertical movements of horizontal desire that is dance, Rae falls under the greater spell of flamenco, and this sustains her throughout the extreme tensions she experiences with her "friend" Didi.

But flamenco is more than a mental catharsis. It has a philosophy, history, and ethic. Rae's flamenco teachers, musicians, and historians explain to Rae throughout the story that its history is intertwined with the wanderings of Gypsies, and the brutalities of Franco Spain. Tomas defined flamenco as `tragedy in the first person'; Dona Carlota as "give me the truth" (dame la verdad). At any cost the dancer and accompanying guitarist must engage in a symbiosis of `flamenco puro.' And it must be held as axiomatic that flamenco cannot be learned. It must be lived.

And indeed Rae did live, and superbly so. In spite of her temporary turmoil, she recovered. Dancers are good at that. They are trained to gracefully recover from a fall. With her life being a combination of mathematics, love, and dance, Rae achieved the Aristotelian eudaemonia; the Csikszentmihalyi flow; the flamenco enterao.

Sarah Bird's follow up book to "The Yokota Officers' Club" is beautiful, moving, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful.

Continuing to explore the "motherless children" theme she visited in "Yokota," she crafts a story with settings and characters that are both familiar and exotic. I was delighted to pick up my copy while on vacation -- not to imply that this is in any way a beach book; it's much too dark for that. It did, however, keep me riveted, despite the lure of the beach and the tchotchke shops.

We see the story through the eyes of Rae, who shares the stories of her flamenco teacher, Dona Carlota, weaving the violent and secretive history of flamenco through Rae's own tumultuous life.

At the risk of writing a spoiler, I'll say that one of my (many) favorite things about the book is the way it ends, with Rae beginning to live her own life, rather than being a supporting character to someone else's story.

What are you planning next, Ms. Bird? I'll be waiting!

I thought I knew what flamenco was: women dancers in gaudy ruffled dresses, spit-curled hair, with clicking castanets, and men in close-fitting jumpsuits stomp-dancing theatrically around each other, an "Andale" thrown in here and there for good measure. After reading "The Flamenco Academy" by Austin writer Sarah Bird, I find I knew nothing at all.

Flamenco is a world unto itself, a cult, certainly a religion of sorts, where the dancers, the guitarists, and the singers are seeking purity and perfection, "flamenco puro."

The novel begins like any other coming-of-age story, two misfit girls finding each other when both their fathers die of cancer. Didi is the wild, plucky tramp, chasing after rock bands, while Rae, the narrator of the novel as well as the nerdy math wizard, follows in Didi's shadows. At one of Didi's groupie parties, Rae meets the enigmatic and fiercely handsome, Tomas Montenegro, flamenco guitarist extraordinaire.

After Tomas has disappeared from her life, Rae becomes obsessed with flamenco. For years she studies the dance, learns the music and the culture, in an effort to become the woman she thinks Tomas will love -- when and if she finds him again. Ultimately, she does.

With the introduction of Dona Carlota, the steely, "gypsy-on-four-sides" dance teacher, the novel takes flight. Dona Carlota, who happens to be Tomas Montenegro's aunt, tells fantastical stories as she teaches her students, of the cave-dwelling gypsies of Granada, of the heavy-handed Generalissimo Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, of the poet and flamenco aficionado Frederico Garcia Lorca.

Dona Carlotta's stories have a mystical quality and comprise most of the middle, and the best parts, of the novel. It is through her stories that the reader begins to understand the passion of flamenco, and to grasp its seductiveness.

Writers don't much like to have their work compared to other writers, or even to their own earlier works. Sarah Bird's previous novels and the characters in them have often been wry and humorous. "The Flamenco Academy" is a departure. There is very little humor here.

Instead there are splendid scenes of explosive dance, the heels on the shoes "aiming for a place one inch beneath the floor," hammering ancient dust from the wooden planks. And there is the drama of the guitarist's long-nailed, sensuous fingers plucking the music from his instrument, and the "wailing, warbling, sobbing" voice of the singer echoing off the walls.

All this is accomplished with a beguiling ease and artistry that drives the narrative even more than the story of love and hate, betrayal and deception. Sarah Bird has recreated the flamenco world and she pulls her reader into it with a clever hand.

What a treat! "Flamenco Academy" tells the story of two women friends, both obsessed by a love they pursue to any lengths. Their story is incredibly involving and entertaining, but then Ms. Bird layers it with another fascinating story that deals with the origins of flamenco, the Spanish civil war and gypsy culture. My book club couldn't stop talking about it -- we had tapas and sangria, so maybe that helped, but the characters are unforgettable -- funny, believable and appealing -- and stay with you even after the book reaches its satisfying ending. This made me seek out other books by Ms. Bird, which I'm finding to be equally enjoyable.

I really enjoyed Sarah Bird's latest novel. I had a hard time putting it down. The lives of the two young women who are the main characters were full of trials and escapades that kept me reading to find out what would happen next. I found the way that Sarah intwined the history of Flamenco into this fictional story to be very entertaining. It was a great read. Sarah's books just keep getting better and I look forward to her next one.

...read this book. If you haven't you might not recognize the obsessed, irrational, almost other worldly kinds of things that love will drive a person to do and to think. I stumbled onto Flamenco Academy as I was ending a relationship. Reading it was as if Bird had tapped into the depths of my heart and lived each moment with me. She gave life to the obsessive passion that Rae had for Tomas, for flamenco and for every thread that might possibly connect them. She so captivated me in the gripping story that it was all I could concentrate on until I finished. I will certainly be looking forward to more from Ms. Bird, such a powerful storyteller.