He is recruited as a stand-in for an injured dancer when he collects his little sister from her ballet lesson. Sixteen-year-old Jamie’s hobbies include cricket and trying to put his hand down his girlfriend’s top. Ure wrote several young adult books about ballet but this 1984 novel is her best: I read my own Puffin Plus copy until it fell apart. The account of his defection at a Paris airport is nailbiting stuff. This blockbuster – the basis for the Ralph Fiennes’s film The White Crow – covers everything from his birth on a Siberian train to the sex drive that was as high as his professional ambition, his partnership with Fonteyn, his friendship with Jackie Kennedy, the way he defied HIV for nine years after diagnosis, working until his death from Aids in 1993. The definitive story of the definitive danseur draws on letters, diaries, home-movie footage and interviews. Oleg Ivenko (right) as Rudolf Nureyev and Ralph Fiennes as his teacher Alexander Pushkin in The White Crow (2018). Hallberg writes as beautifully as he moves. He evokes the loneliness of success and his ostracism as a young man at the Paris Opera makes the tentative friendships he forges in Moscow all the sweeter. Hallberg was the first American to join the Bolshoi as a principal, and this book is an emotionally raw crisis of injury and ego, the story of a world-class athlete pushing the limits of sports medicine. She is pulled back to the east coast, and Arslan, with shattering results. But her son’s prodigious talent becomes impossible to ignore. The book is as powerful on the sacrifices of motherhood as it is when evoking the heady atmosphere of 1970s Manhattan. Joan, a young American dancer, helps Russian ballet star Arslan Ruskov defect from the USSR, then stages a defection of her own, to the Californian suburbs, to teach and raise a family. It takes its title from legendary New York City Ballet choreographer George Balanchine’s command to his dancers, and his ghost is on every page. There are surprisingly few adult novels about ballet, but this exquisitely written book sets the bar. The writing is suffused with a teenage sensuousness: costumier’s fabrics such as organza and taffeta seem to caress the reader’s skin as well as the characters’. Pretty Pauline’s temper tantrum is one of the best meltdowns in any literature, and results in one of the most relatable comeuppances. The characters are complicated, enviable, flawed. I believe the book’s endurance is down to its depictions of adolescence as much as the dance detail. Orphans Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil are adopted by eccentric Great Uncle Matthew when the money runs out, they take to the stage to pay the bills. This 1936 classic remains a touchstone for balletomane children.
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