At Seventeen, Toni Bentley was Chosen by George Balanchine, then in his final years, to join the New York City Ballet. From backstage and onstage, she carries us through the serendipitous history and physical intricacies of one of his greatest works, Serenade: its dazzling opening, with seventeen women in a double-diamond pattern; its radical use of the highly refined language that is ballet; its place in the choreographer's own dramatic story of fleeing from Soviet Russia; its mystical-and literal-embodiment of the tradition of classical ballet in just thirty-three minutes. Bentley takes us inside the rarefied and thrilling world Balanchine created through his lifelong devotion to celebrating female beauty and strength-a world that, inevitably, passed upon his death. An intimate elegy to grace and loss and to the imprint of a towering artist on Bentley's own life, Serenade: A Balanchine Story is a rich narrative about the nature of art itself at its most ephemeral and glorious.