Back-stage

Lorna Hill's Back-stage is a ballet story for 10 year olds about a girl who grows up in the wings of a little London variety theatre.

What happens

Anna Grimaldi tells it herself, looking back. Her mother is the ballerina at the Duke's Theatre, and Anna spends her early years toddling between painted cardboard cottages and dusty velvet curtains. By four she knows the one rule that really matters. Never step over the white line in the wings, or the audience will see you!

The theatre people are her family. There's Sarah the dresser, who's a second mum to her. There's Joady, the tightrope walker's son, who races her down the stone corridors. And there's a French dancer who performs with two tame penguins (the sea lion had to go to the zoo).

Anna is a fierce little thing. When a man outside the theatre is rude about her mother's dancing, she bites his ankle!

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The saddest part comes early. In chapter three, Anna's mother collapses at the end of her famous swan dance and dies. Anna is too small to understand. She's told her mother has gone to Heaven, and she imagines it as a sort of long holiday. It's months before children in the playground tell her the truth.

It's told very gently, but it is sad. For a child who has recently lost someone, it might be a hard one. For a reader who loves a heroine who keeps going, it's lovely.

After that, Sarah takes Anna in and there are ballet lessons with a shouty old teacher who secretly thinks she could be a star. There are school bullies too, who pinch her first proper ballet dress and hang it on a chimney. Then the old theatre itself is to be pulled down.

It's written in an older, more formal style, with a few old-fashioned words and names that sound dated now. Dance-mad readers won't mind a bit. There's SO much real ballet in it, from barre work to fifth position.

It's part of Lorna Hill's long ballet series, but Anna's story starts from the very beginning, so it works on its own.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, Lorna Hill's Dress Rehearsal is in the library too. Nona starts life in a hospital ward where nobody expects her ever to walk, let alone dance.