A sometimes-harrowing but ultimately inspiring remembrance of recovery and creative self-expression.
In this memoir, Todling writes of how an unhappy marriage made her neglect her love for dance, until she decided to make a change.
As a child, the author loved to dance, choreographing intricate routines with friends and performing them for family. When her mother brought her to a club to perform on her 13th birthday, she says, she realized that she wanted to dance for the rest of her life. However, at the age 20, she impulsively agreed to marry a man she didn’t love, and her ambitions for a successful career fell to the wayside, in part because he discouraged her from pursuing it. Todling writes with startling honesty about the dissolution of her marriage, a decade-long unraveling catalyzed by her husband’s battle with apparent allergies and an anxiety disorder; after initial attempts to get a diagnosis failed, he stopped seeing any doctors, she says. Instead, he insisted that she never leave the house while he was awake. The constant demands on the author intensified until she was scarcely able to leave the house, and she stopped dancing entirely. She distanced herself from friends and delayed promotions at work, while her spouse constantly scolded her and exhibited controlling behavior; it later emerged, she says, that he was fully capable of taking care of himself. In a pivotal scene, Todling decides to travel to Europe with her sister against her husband’s wishes. There, she felt the tether to her troubled marriage loosen and realized that she needed to transform her life. In the years that followed, her career took off, allowing her to visit dozens of countries for dance classes. Over the course of this memoir, in scenes recalled with vivid, painful detail, Todling describes her sadness, as when she felt forced to give up plans for her 30th birthday party with family and friends (“Shortly before midnight, I decided to cancel….As I sent the texts, I felt the tears well up, my body filled with regret and shame”). Later, she effectively relates her discovery of true romance, which she’d never experienced before.
A sometimes-harrowing but ultimately inspiring remembrance of recovery and creative self-expression.Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781647428785
Page Count: 200
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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