Georgia, the teenaged protagonist of Martha Schabas’s debut novel, is nearly out of middle school. She can’t wait to ditch her uncouth peers for the purity and purposefulness of freshman year at the Royal Toronto Ballet Academy. There, Georgia imagines, she’ll be free of their adolescent preoccupation with sex, which she finds disconcerting, as well as her emotionally unstable home life. Her father is a cold and disapproving neuro-psychiatrist, her mother a needy and sad professor, and her overprotective half-sister a student of critical theory at the University of Toronto.

To this point, Georgia has coped by compartmentalizing her thoughts and feelings, and by focusing on physical discipline. Through ballet and its careful attention to the body’s mechanisms, she achieves autonomy she’s never found elsewhere. But as Georgia learns more about the nature of her parents’ May-December relationship, and starts to think of people in terms of sex – who’s having it, who wants it, and with whom – the outside world seeps into her emotional fortress. Georgia’s confusion culminates in misreading her ballet teacher’s motives, leading her to mount an extremely risky (and mortifying) stunt to win him over.

In Schabas’s conception, however, it’s the world outside Georgia’s self-contained bubble that is dangerous and depraved. The chaos in Georgia’s life results from the lessons she learns from the world at large, be it her parent’s dysfunctional interactions, her sister’s self-righteous feminist rhetoric, or the online environments of Google and Internet porn.

A trained dancer, Schabas’s depiction of the ballet scene is authentic and believable. The narrative voice at times seems unnatural for a teenager – Georgia comes off as oddly conservative compared to her peers in preferring words like “bum” to “ass,” and advanced for her age in describing a room as “impenetrable.” However, since there is clearly something a little off about Georgia, her idiosyncratic turns of phrase are somehow fitting. Various Positions is a provocative, dark, and challenging read, which provides a fresh take on difficult questions about human nature in our contemporary world.