Swing time - Zadie Smith

Only in Spain - Nellie Bennett

Only in Spain - Bennett, Nellie

Summary: Shares the author's experiences after leaving her retail job in Australia to travel to Spain and learn flamenco dance, detailing her lessons in Seville, and her eventual move to Madrid.

Kirkus Reviews
A peripatetic Australian's account of how a flamenco dancing hobby led to high adventures in music, food and love in Spain.Bennett was a bored shop girl who worked at a high-end department store in Sydney. Tired of two years of mind-numbing, dead-end routine, she shook up her world with flamenco dance lessons, and she immediately fell in love with the glamour, fire and romance of the dance. Soon, she realized she wanted more than to simply take lessons; she wanted to "dream [her] life and live life like it was a dream" by making flamenco the center of her world. She decided to continue her dance studies in the ancient city of Seville in southern Spain. For six weeks, Bennett danced by day and immersed herself in flamenco bar culture by night. She learned to relish the pleasures of flirting on the dance floor with handsome, dark-eyed Spanish men, who made her feel as though she was "the star of her very own Broadway musical." The vegan Bennett even learned to enjoy savory tapas dishes made from meat. By the end of her stay, she knew she would return. Brimming with intentions to live in Spain indefinitely and aspirations to become a professional flamenco dancer, she flew to Madrid several months later. She attended the famous Amor de Dios flamenco academy and then danced with dangerously seductive neighborhood residents when she could no longer afford to go to the academy. After being kidnapped by a gypsy boyfriend who wanted to "marry" her by taking Bennett home with him, she fell in love with a Basque man with whom she lived for three years. Only after her lover asked her what she wanted did the author recognize her one truest passion: to travel forever into the beautiful unknown.Lightweight, footloose good fun. Copyright Kirkus 2014 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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Maybe one day - Melissa Kantor

Maybe one day - Kantor, Melissa

Summary: "Zoe thought that being cut from her ballet program was the worst thing that could hapen, but when her best friend, Olivia, is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, Zoe quickly learns that not being able to dance is the least of her problems"-- Provided by publisher.


Booklist Reviews
The worst thing ever happens to forever friends Olivia and Zoe when they are cut from their prestigious ballet troupe. Livvie joins other activities, but Zoe is adrift without the one thing that mattered to her. Then Livvie is diagnosed with leukemia, and Zoe's life is fractured once again. She spends as much time as possible with Livvie, while needing to keep up at school and navigating the growing connection between herself and Calvin, Livvie's crush. Kantor ably steers the reader through the intensity of Zoe's brief life-changing experience, weaving in realistic high-school dynamics and Zoe's search for anything to take her mind off her sadness. What she finds is solace by subbing for Livvie at the beginning ballet classes at a community center and kissing Calvin any chance she gets. Though this contemporary cancer story laced with everyday and extraordinary experiences will undoubtedly draw comparisons to that other cancer book, Livvie's cancer story and Zoe's emotionally complex web of friendship, fear, loss, love, pain, have their own appeal, and are well worth reading. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

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The painted girls - Cathy Marie Buchanan

The painted girls - Buchanan, Cathy Marie

Summary: In belle époque Paris, the Van Goethem sisters struggle for survival after the sudden death of their father, a situation that prompts young Marie's ballet training and her introduction to a genius painter.


Booklist Reviews
Buchanan's exquisite historical novel details the lives of would-be ballerinas Antoinette, Marie, and Charlotte van Goethem. Responsible for fending for themselves after the death of their father and the absinthe-soaked decline of their mother, the van Goethem sisters struggle to eke out an existence while subsidizing their ambitions at the harshly competitive school of the Paris Opéra. When Marie is selected by Edgar Degas to pose for his future masterpiece, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,and Antoinette snags a bit part in the stage adaptation of Émile Zola's L'Assommoir, the extra income enables them to avoid, for a while, the tragic pitfalls of life on the lower slopes of Montmartre. To make things even more interesting, Buchannan links the sisters' stories with that of convicted criminals Emile Abadie and Michel Knobloch, the subjects of Degas' Criminal Physiognomies. By intertwining the narrative threads of these drawn-from-history characters, she paints a realistically robust portrait of working-class life in late nineteenth-century Paris. Guaranteed to appeal to fans of Tracy Chevalier, Susan Vreeland, and Melanie Benjamin. Copyright 2012 Booklist Reviews.

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Apollo's angels - Jennifer Homans

Apollo's angels: a history of ballet - Homans, Jennifer

Summary: "Unique among the arts, ballet has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. A ballerina dancing today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and culture that followed. From ballet's origins in the Renaissance and the codification of its basic steps and positions under France's Louis XIV (himself an avid dancer), the art form wound its way through the courts of Europe, from Paris and Milan to Vienna and St. Petersburg. Jennifer Homans, a historian and critic who was also a professional dancer, traces the evolution of technique, choreography, and performance in clear prose, drawing readers into the intricacies of the art with vivid descriptions of dances and the artists who made them"--From publisher description.

Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* Homans brings her intimate experience as a dancer and her discerning dance critic's eye to her fascinating and exquisitely detailed history of ballet, an art that combines rigor and idealism. Homans begins with how the Renaissance belief in the transforming power of art engendered the first ballets, which were performed in the sixteenth-century French court of King Henri II and Catherine de Medici, thus launching ballet's long association with state governments. Louis XIV then established ballet's core rules and conventions, including the five "true" or noble positions. Homans thoroughly and conversantly tracks ballet's flourishing in France, robust flowering in Russia, and exuberance in the U.S., emphasizing the progression from elaborate artifice to profound expressiveness. Homans also warmly profiles pivotal ballet masters, choreographers, and dancers, including the pioneering ballerina Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide (1832), "the first modern ballet," and the essential Balanchine. Most arrestingly, Homans assesses ballet's grace under terror during the French and Russian revolutions, the world wars, and the cold war. Homans brings her glorious landmark study of ballet's ideals and enchantment to a somber close as she asks why this strong and supple "art of belief," which triumphed over catastrophe and adversity, is now in danger of extinction. Copyright 2010 Booklist Reviews.

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Mao's last dancer - Cunxin Li

Mao's last dancer - Li, Cunxin

Summary: Chosen from millions of children to serve in Mao's cultural revolution by studying at the Beijing Dance Academy, Li knew ballet would be his family's best opportunity to escape the bitter poverty in his rural China home. From one hardship to another, Li persevered, never forgetting the family he left behind.



Kirkus Reviews
A prominent ballet dancer revisits the strange course that led him from a Chinese hamlet to the world stage.Mix Billy Elliott with Torn Curtain and you'll have some of the tale in very broad outline. Born in 1961, Li lived his early years under the shadow of Mao's Great Leap Forward, which had impoverished the already poor countryside to an almost unbelievable extent. "Dried yams were our basic food for most of the year," Li writes. "We occasionally had flour and corn bread for a treat, but those were my [mother's] special reserves for relatives or important visitors. . . . Dried yams were the most hated food in my family, but there were others in the commune that could not even afford dried yams. We were luckier than most." Luck came in another form when Madame Mao decided that recruiting ballet dancers from the provinces would prove to the world that Chinese Communism was truly egalitarian, whereupon Li was packed off to dance school. "The officials mentioned ballet," he writes, "but all I knew about ballet was what I'd seen in the movie The Red Detachment of Women." Willing but slow to learn ("I was considered a laggard by most of my teachers," he writes with characteristic modesty), Li eventually found his feet, at the same time finding a purpose: "to serve glorious communism." One exchange trip to Texas, though, and Li, now in his late teens, was ready for something else. Li's well-paced account of the ensuing cloak-and-dagger episodes that led to his defection to the West adds suspense to a tale already full of adventures, but there are no conventional bad guys to be found in it. Indeed, he writes with fine compassion for the Chinese consul who attempts to dissuade him from becoming an outcast; "unlike me, he had to go back and would probably never manage to get out again."Nicely written and humane: for anyone interested in modern Chinese history or for fans of dance. Copyright Kirkus 2004 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.

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Dancing with butterflies: a novel - Reyna Grande

Dancing with butterflies: a novel - Grande, Reyna


Summary: Chronicles the story of four women in Los Angeles bound together in friendship by their Mexican roots and their love of Folklorico dance. - (Baker & Taylor)



Booklist Reviews
"Mexican-born Grande focuses on a subculture in the Latino community to explore universal themes in this worthy follow-up to her award-winning debut novel, Across a Hundred Mountains (2006). Folklórico, a dance that emphasizes the local culture of different regions of Mexico, is the focus around which the stories of four L.A. women and their losses are intertwined. Yesería, who founded Grupo Folklorico Alegría, takes desperate measures to regain her ability and appearance after arthritis curtails her performing. Elena, an Alegría member who codirects a folklórico group at the high school where she teaches, is so immobilized by grief after her baby is stillborn that she ends both her marriage and her dancing. Her younger sister and fellow dancer, Adriana, still angry over childhood events, increasingly allows her lesser self to lapse into destructive behavior. Soledad, a skilled seamstress who makes the group's costumes, has her hopes for the future dashed by the man she loves. Yet the strength of folklórico prevails, as the novel celebrates the sheer exhilaration and physicality of dance and the sustenance of female bonding." Copyright 2009 Booklist Reviews.

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Dancer: a novel - Colum McCann

Dancer: a novel - McCann, Colum

Summary: Presents a fictional account of the life of Rudolf Nureyev, following his first ballet lessons under Anna Vasileva, his relationship with the ambitious Yulia, and his experiences with Venezuelan hustler Victor. - (Baker & Taylor)



Library Journal Reviews
McCann's latest (after Everything in This Country Must) is hugely ambitious: a fictionalized account of the life of Rudolph Nureyev-the Cold War danseur noble lauded as the world's first "pop star dancer"-as told by those who knew him. Among the narrators are the irrepressible Yulia, the daughter of Nureyev's first ballet teacher; Margot Fonteyn, Rudik's brilliant dance partner; Victor, a gay hustler from the Lower East Side with a penchant for blow, bath houses, and back talk; and others. What emerges is a pastiche of both the man and the myth, the disparate voices combining to create a lyrical and variegated portrait. The narrative technique can, however, be disorienting and even frustrating, as the reader cares more about some narrators than others and is loath to depart from them. McCann also has a somewhat irksome tendency to over-explain moments he should allow to resonate on their own. Still, the work hangs together well and is finally an enormous achievement. Both the Soviet Union of the war-torn 1940s and the displacement and hopefulness of an exile's life are perfectly evoked, and Nureyev-impossible, erratic, and brilliant-is a golden flame that sets everything ablaze. Recommended for all contemporary fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/02.]-Tania Barnes, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.


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