A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This is my favorite children's novel about ballet. Yes, including Ballet Shoes. I don't know how many times I've re-read it other than "a lot."

Doone Penny wasn't supposed to be a dancer. His mother danced professionally, very briefly and in a very minor way, before marrying a greengrocer and having six boys. When Mrs. Penny finally had a girl, she decided that her daughter Crystal would have the dancing career she never had. Her final child, Doone, was the afterthought. But when Crystal has to babysit Doone by taking him along to her ballet lessons, Doone falls in love with ballet.

Doone has a whole lot of obstacles that Crystal doesn't have to deal with, as his mother doesn't take him seriously or want to spend money on his lessons, his father is outright opposed to his son dancing as he think it will make him gay, and his brothers think it's sissy and bully him. But he also has some advantages that Crystal doesn't have: adult professionals generally like him a lot and want to mentor him, and the lack of expectations means that he can pursue dance purely for the love of it, without it being tangled up in resentment and rebellion and obligation.

Rumer Godden knew a lot about dance - she studied it seriously and taught a dance school, though she I don't think she ever danced professionally. The whole book is about ballet (and secondarily music), written about in a completely engaging style. In terms of how to make the process of a particular pursuit fascinating, it's like Dick Francis wrote a book about ballet and forgot to put in a murder.

The world of ballet school has all the pleasures of a boarding school story plus backstage drama. All the characters you know from theatre are there. Yuri Korszorz is the brilliant, sexy ballet star and choreographer who throws the school into a tizzy when he swoops in to look for a few young people to dance in his new ballet. I know the type well. We had one of them at my college. I had a massive crush on him, heard rumors that he had affairs with students, and felt both creeped out and jealous. Yuri is beneficial for the students with whom he has completely professional interactions with, and destructive or destabilizing for others. (The inappropriate touching consists of one kiss, but he also does some inappropriate toying with emotions.)

Most of the ballet adults are, thankfully, much more positive iterations on mentor and teacher figures; if they have feet of clay, it's mostly in a way that isn't harmful to anyone but themselves. Godden's characterization of a rather large cast is excellent, sketching in the minor characters vividly and the main ones - Doone, Crystal, and Mrs. Penny - brilliantly.

Doone in particular is an unusual, memorable character. He struggles with schoolwork due to what we can recognize as dyslexia or some other learning disability, but which Godden apparently observed well enough to depict without knowing what it was. Doone is a quiet, earnest, rather literal-minded boy with a gift for both music and dancing, a love for dancing that probably surpasses even his talent for it, and an understated stubbornness that enables him to persevere through being ignored, being actively discouraged, and worse. For Doone, everything about dance is fraught except the dance itself. He's the epitome of keeping his eyes on the prize, but for him, the prize is just to keep dancing.