If you have an intermediate reader who is interested in ballet, “Rosie’s Big City Ballet” is for you.
Rosie takes ballet once a week, and she thinks it would be nice to become a ballerina some day, but she sometimes forgets to practice, and there are times when she’d rather be outside playing than thinking about her assignments. She has an older neighbor named Amy who is in the chorus at a ballet in the city, and she invites Rosie to come see a performance of “Romeo and Juliet.”
Rosie is delighted, and even more so when she gets to meet a real ballerina backstage. That ballerina tells her that it’s very important that she practice and get serious if she ever really wants to be a dancer, and Rosie promises to try, but there are so many things that come up to distract her, like her little brother, and her best friend, Murph, who is trying to build a tree house. But she’ll do her best.
Then word comes that Miss Elise, an artistic director from a major ballet company, is coming to audition the children in Rosie’s class for a part. And, she’s going to stay at Rosie’s house! She can hardly contain her excitement and vows to practice every single day. When the audition arrives, Rosie doesn’t make the cut, but then she is offered something much, much better.
This book was a lot of fun. We learn the names of the some of the basic, and more complex, ballet moves, and we see that it can be hard to focus on just one thing when there’s so much going on, but it’s all a matter of bringing life into balance, and we can work and have fun too.
(This book was published in 1998 by Viking.)
Related Blogs: