Tag: ballet books

Children's books

Girl’s Own series: Helen trilogy

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After writing about some modern ballet with Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man on Sunday, it seemed fitting to write about a ballet series this Friday. All three of these were bought at Bristol conference, so I’ve even read them pretty promptly too, which doesn’t always happen for me!

I wasn’t quite sure what to call this series – I’ve called it the Helen trilogy even though that’s probably not going to mean anything to anyone but it is three books about Helen, who we follow across her ballet and dancing career. They were written in the late 1950s and take her from her audition for ballet school and initial professional experience in the first book, through dancing (ballet) in a musical theatre show in book two and on a television show in book three. There is also a love interest – because of course there is, good girls in Girl’s Own books get a nice boy – who is one of the male dancers we meet in the second half of the first book and a large portion of book three is devoted to a misunderstanding in their relationship which could have been solved by actually having a conversation and would have been very tedious if you hadn’t read the two previous books – and was still quite tedious for me when I had!

Ballet stories were among my favourite childhood reads and even now I have copies of books in the Sadlers Wells and Drina series on bookshelves that I can see as I type this post. So it’s not a suprise that I would have picked up another series of ballet storie at conference. And these aren’t anywhere near as good as those are but they’re not awful. The first is definitely the best of the three – with a clear sense of the routine of classes and training that a trainee dancer would need to try and become a professional. It’s not as good on the uncertainty or peril because there’s never really as sense that Helen isn’t going to make it – even though her parents have given her a time limit on her training she’s set up as being talented and also the teacher’s favourite. Sadler’s Wells has various obstacles that the heroines have to go through – whether it’s moving away from teachers, parents who don’t want them to dance, lack of money – and Drina has a grandmother who doesn’t want her to dance and a big secret that might make her success not entirely because of her own merits. I did like all the detail of what working in TV was like in book three and I don’t feel like I paid too much for them, but they’re not where I would be telling someone to start if they wanted a Girl’s Own ballet story to try.

This is another one of those cases where I’m not really expecting any of you to want to read these but they are going to be hard to get hold of. I can see a couple of copies of each of them on abebooks – all of them for more than I paid and more than think they’re worth. But if you’re now desparate to read them and want to make me an offer for my copies you know where I am…

Have a great weekend!

Book of the Week, Children's books, Forgotten books

Book of the Week: A Time to Dance

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It’s been a couple of weeks of Girl’s Own type books, so I’ve no regrets about making another of them this week’s Book of the Week and carrying on the theme of theatres and dancing.

A Time to Dance is a standalone ballet career book about the first couple of terms of a newly established ballet school in the north of England. It follows a selection of the pupils as they study dance, help promote the school and try and work out if dancing is really what they want to do. It’s quite gentle and there’s no peril really at all – even less than usual in these books if anything, but I particular enjoyed the fact that it focussed on several of the girls and the different challenges they faced.

Most of the time in ballet books you have a school-age heroine who is convinced that she is destined to dance and that there is nothing she would rather do with her life. But this has a couple of older pupils who have left school are trying to balance learning to dance with jobs and the need for cash. And it’s got several girls who are studying even though ballet isn’t going to be their career. Of course it does have a desperate to dance or two too, but I appreciated the variety and the realism it added to the mix. This was written in the early 1960s and has a more modern feel to some of the other books – the potential distractions for the students include television adverts and modelling.

I haven’t read any Robina Beckles Willson before but this was charming. Goodreads only has this and a couple of picture books under her name, and I didn’t get a chance to look her up to see what else she might have written that hasn’t made it into Goodreads database!

I got my copy at one of the book sales at conference, but I suspect that most of you aren’t going to be interested enough in the genre to want to buy it! If you do, you’ll probably need a specialist bookseller or a lot of luck.

Happy reading!

Children's books, Series I love

Series I Love: Sadlers Wells

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I am off to book conference this weekend, so in honour of all the fun I’ll be having, this week’s series I love post is a Girls Own one.

Lorna Hill’s Sadlers Wells series follows a series of young women as they embark upon careers in dancing. The first book, A Dream of Sadlers Wells was first published in 1950 and follows newly orphaned Veronica Weston as she tries to carry on learning ballet despite having moved to live with her cousins in Northumberland. The second book follows Veronica as she embarks upon her training at Sadlers Wells ballet school (now the Royal Ballet) and the other books in the series all follow girls who have a link to Veronica somehow.

Despire being clumsy and coordinated, I loved ballet books when I was a child and moved on to Sadlers wells after I had started on the Drina series – as both had reissues at about the right time for me. But the Sadlers Wells ones were harder to find – and didn’t go the whole way to the end of the series, so some of the later ones I’ve only read in the last five or so years. And the end of the series isn’t a good as the start, but the first half dozen or so are just great. Because they focus on different people you also get glimpses of your old favourites as you carry on. In fact a bit like romance series, some of them set up the next heroine in the previous book!

And where Drina is a city girl through and through, nervously learning to love the Chiltern when she’s sent to school there for a term, she is worried about getting injured and ruining her dance career (and she does indeed twist her ankle at one point) the women of the Wells books embrace the outdoors. Veronica, Caroline, Jane and Mariella romp around the countryside on their ponies, swim in lakes and clamber around the hills. They made me want to visit Northumberland – although not learn to ride a horse.

It’s only thinking about it as an adult that I realise that, like many Girls Own books of the era, they’re subtly quite subversive in their way. In the first two books, Veronica refuses to give up her ambitions of a dancing career in the face of various trials and tribulations – but also in the face of a potential love interest. Sebastian is a musical prodigy and in one quite awful speech when he’s trying to persuade Veronica not to go to London, he says that women don’t have to have careers and could (and maybe should) leave it to the men. But Veronica carries on – and gets the success and the love too. In the later books you can see her and Sebastian, married but she’s still dancing. And if they don’t do a very good of listening to their daughter Vicki, they don’t really do a worse job than any of the other parents in the book! But the message is there – girls don’t have to just grow up and get married, they can do things and have a career too.

Happy weekend everyone.