American Girl – Designs by Isabelle

Laurence Yep's American Girl - Designs by Isabelle is a ballet story for 8 year olds about a girl who can see exactly how a costume ought to look, and still can't get her pirouettes right.

What happens

Isabelle Palmer has a part in The Nutcracker. She's the Gingerbread Girl, the one who leaps out from under Mother Ginger's enormous skirt and then gets chased round the stage.

Her big sister Jade is Clara. Her classmate Renata is her understudy, which means Renata spends rehearsals rather hoping something happens to Isabelle. (The two of them get on, Isabelle says, like cats and dogs.)

What Isabelle really thinks about is costumes. Her mum sells fabric art at craft fairs, and Isabelle designed her own waltzing flower outfit for the autumn show. When the director notices, he asks for her opinion on the children's costumes in the party scene, because he isn't up on what young people are wearing.

So she has two things running at once. A dance she can't yet do, and a job nobody her age is ever given.

It's told by Isabelle, and the quiet bits are the good ones. She rehearses by imagining a chest of toys and lifting them out one at a time, which is how she gets her spin. She unjams a five-year-old's mouse costume in a corridor, then teaches three small mice to swagger because she remembered a picture book about three blind ones. Then she panics that the director saw her messing about when she should have been practising.

Anyone who has watched a child be quietly brilliant at the thing nobody is marking them on will recognise the whole shape of it.

It's American, by the way. Mom, Thanksgiving, the mall, a children's ward at a hospital. The ballet is the same everywhere, and Isabelle explains the whole plot of The Nutcracker plainly in about a page, which is genuinely useful if you're taking anyone to see it.

There's nothing upsetting in the part I read. Renata is sharp rather than cruel, and the worst thing that happens is a jammed zip.

What to read next

For more of the same, try Favourite Ballet Stories. It opens with a girl who turns up to her first class in black when every other child is in pink.