The Magic of the Ballet: Swan Lake - Hardcover

Reviewed with Adele Geras' Sleeping Beauty .

Gr. 3-5, younger for reading aloud. These attractive books from The Magic of Ballet series tell the stories of major ballets. Each volume features fairly large type, decorative borders, and Emma Chichester Clark's richly atmospheric paintings. An appendix in each book traces the ballet's history, music, choreography, and related matters such as dance notations. Swan Lake is a difficult undertaking with its darker, adult story and tragic ending. Geras makes the ballet more understandable to those who aren't familiar with it, but the story loses a great deal in translation from stage to page. Stripped of the emotional content of music, gesture, and dance as well as costume and staging, this moving ballet becomes comparatively uninvolving. Still, with a bit more text than typical picture-book retellings, all the volumes in this series will be helpful to middle-graders attending a ballet performance. Carolyn Phelan
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Grade 2-4-These retellings of three of the best-known classical ballets are really more about the magic of storytelling than the dance. Giselle is told from the point of view of a grief-stricken Albrecht. Sleeping Beauty has multiple narrators, and Swan Lake is told in the third person. The stories are told with flair and drama that will read aloud well. An introductory two-page summary of dance in general and classical ballet in particular is the same in all three books. The concluding four pages give a short performance history and talk about various topics related to the art form. Each book is attractively decorated with colorful borders and watercolor illustrations of key scenes. For those who want only the plots of the classical ballets, stick with Barbara Newman's The Illustrated Book of Ballet Stories (DK, 1997) and Antonia Barber's Shoes of Satin, Ribbons of Silk: Tales from the Ballet (Kingfisher, 1995).
Amy Kellman, The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, PA
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