I was pretty sure I was going to like this. Too bad it turned out to be terrible. Like so many other YA books these days, it seems like the cover is the highlight and every page after I flipped the book open just went downhill. 
 For a book set in a ballet school, there was very little actual description of dance - other than how perfectly Vanessa dances. I should have known something was amiss when I got to the part of the cover flap description about how "Vanessa must elegantly outstep the back-stabbing bunheads..." 
 Let's set something straight here. She immediately befriends everyone in her class and there is no backstabbing, anywhere. There are possibly some of the most cliched descriptions of the typical "mean girl" group of seniors, who all look alike, dress alike, have the same tan, and gee, just hate Vanessa so much, all because poor Vanessa stole the leader's boyfriend at first sight and stole the principal ballerina role to boot. (Maybe they hate her because she is such a Mary Sue?) 
 Both main male characters in this book frankly could not have been more undesirable. I'm getting used to the instant love formula of YA novels, but this novel takes it to extremes. After the crucial first sight scenes of amaaaaaazing eye contact, the guy is already planning on how to dump his current girlfriend. Said girlfriend gets promptly dumped and the guy hooks up with Vanessa, who is ecstatic - not a single word of worry over his actions. I suppose he's not actually cheating for long as he does drop his girlfriend, but c'mon now. 
 The other guy is a jerk. Unfortunately, he's not even a hot jerk or an interesting jerk, he's just kind of...there. 
 Most frustrating is that in addition to Vanessa's utterly forgettable character - honestly, after over 300 pages I can't come up with a single description of her personality - is that her romance is somehow even more forgettable than her character. Oh, he's hot and he dances well. She's in love and constantly daydreaming about him before I can even put the period on that sentence. She likes him...why? He likes her...why? Who needs reasons, right? Look, they're hot! And they dance! And now Zep is going to let out a soft moan and they can make out. This is supposed to make the reader feel...something, I'm sure. They had pizza together once, he sends crappy impersonal text messages, and that's all I remember. 
 I've read a lot of bad romance, but this particular portrayal of a relationship is just baffling. To be honest, the whole book was baffling and I feel like I just spend a couple hours reading something of no substance. The plot is thin enough that I feel like it could have more successfully been a 30 page short story. Instead, we're left with hundreds of pages of filler and at the end of the book, I got the feeling that the author was desperately trying to stretch out a simple concept into multiple books so she could sell a YA series. Let me sum up the concept in one sentence: special dance choreography can be used in the black arts and summon forth a demon. That's it. That's what took 369 pages for Vanessa to oh-so-very-slowly discover, despite several leaps of imagination already built into the plot, like having 13 girls - the brightest ballet stars who got the lead roles - disappear in about 20 years, at supposedly one of the most prestigious ballet schools. NO ONE NOTICES. Yeah, no amount of "but the police just thought they all ran away!" is going to cover up that plot hole. Of course, given the ending, "they just ran away" seems to be an excuse that covers just about anything. 
 At the end of the book, Vanessa is right where she started: still looking for her sister. Has her character changed or matured in any way? NO. 
 "Riveting and sexy, Dance of Shadows twists the cutthroat world of ballet with a psychological thriller, in a dance you won't be able to resist." 
 Almost every word of that introductory blurb is just wrong.