Full disclosure: Laura Jacobs and I have been talking dance (and theater and music...) for decades now. So, don't expect me to be impartial—not when I'm quoted, listed in her index, and most handsomely singled out in the acknowledgments. That's not to say I don't have an honest opinion, so if you're interested, read on.
If the subtitle leads you to expect a primer for curious beginners, you're off the mark. Yes, with its meditations on the implication of ballet's five positions, the arabesque, and other fundamentals, Laura's guide will give you a worthwhile grounding. But this is not, as it were, the work of a grammarian. Laura is one of the viewers who are all there, thinking all the time, constantly revising spontaneous impressions.
There are those who will say (some customer reviewers have done so) that Laura overwrites. Sure enough, if a single metaphor or simile per topics exhausts your tolerance, you may think so, too. At one level, her centrifugal enchaînements of free association are the very opposite of analysis: images arc through her mind like meteor showers off a disco ball, scattering every which way yet within their own broad band of harmony. At her best, she achieves by accretion of detail the depth of focus more conventionally arrived at by reduction, by stripping away.
One other thing: Laura is the least doctrinaire of balletomanes, unwilling to stake out absolutist positions. You may want to see your classics in the Platonic purity (if that's what it is) of their original performances. Or perhaps you prefer to let them evolve performance by performance, season by season (as indeed they must, in the flow of time). So be it. Laura has her crushes, her predilections, her changes of heart. By example, she invites new aficionados to develop their own.