City of Night Birds

A Novel

By: Juhea Kim

Narrated by: Amy Landon

REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK

""This story left me thinking about the ways we overcome setbacks and redefine what truly matters."" - Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club December '24 Pick)

A once-famous ballerina faces a final choice—to return to the world of Russian dance that nearly broke her, or to walk away forever—in this incandescent novel of redemption and love

On a White Night in 2019, prima ballerina Natalia Leonova returns to St. Petersburg two years after a devastating accident that stalled her career. Once the most celebrated dancer of her generation, she now turns to pills and alcohol to numb the pain of her past.

She is unmoored in her old city as the ghosts of her former life begin to resurface: her loving but difficult mother, her absentee father, and the two gifted dancers who led to her downfall.

One of those dancers, Alexander, is the love of her life, who transformed both Natalia and her art. The other is Dmitri, a dark and treacherous genius. When the latter offers her a chance to return to the stage in her signature role, Natalia must decide whether she can again face the people responsible for both her soaring highs and darkest hours.

Painting a vivid portrait of the Russian ballet world, where cutthroat ambition, ever-shifting politics, and sublime artistry collide, City of Night Birds unveils the making of a dancer with both profound intimacy and breathtaking scope. Mysterious and alluring, passionate and virtuosic, Juhea Kim’s second novel is an affecting meditation on love, forgiveness, and the making of an artist in a turbulent world.

Perfection!

Everything about this is wonderful! I absorbed this book. The reader is excellent. The story. The ballet world . . .

Not what I expected. In a good way.

At first, I felt like the narrator and the story were going to be interminably slow. However, the narrator was perfect for this story, and I really enjoyed learning about ballet, and the sacrifices it requires to be a ballerina.

Lovely story. The narration sounds like AI.

I really enjoyed the story. As a dancer myself, I found the description of movement and the love of dance very relatable. However, the reader sounds like artificial intelligence. The inflection and sentence structure is all wrong. This would be a better read than listen.

A nice story.

I'm very glad that I did this on audio, I would not have ever gotten the names and dance terms correctly on my own. The story was nice but the characters didn't happen to pull me in all that well.

Fantastic. 100/10

I was initially unsure about the story and didn’t expect to enjoy it. However, I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly I became engrossed. By the end of the book, I was moved to tears. The story resonated deeply, reflecting life’s various phases and the people we encounter along the way. I can’t recommend this book enough and am so glad I stuck with it.