Dress Rehearsal

Lorna Hill's Dress Rehearsal is a gentle ballet story for 11 year olds about a little girl who takes her first steps because a ballerina danced for her.

What happens

Nona Browning has a very hard start. Her mother dies on the night she's born, and the kind nurse who adopts her dies a few years later. Nona spends her early childhood in hospitals having operations on her legs. By the time she's five, the doctors can see she could walk. She just won't.

Then, at a hospital Christmas party in London, a dancer called Sylvia Swan comes in as the Sugar Plum Fairy. Nona, who hasn't moved for anyone, sits up, stands and walks to the end of her bed. Sylvia promises to teach her to dance.

That's the heart of the book. A child with every reason to give up, holding on to one promise. Sylvia teaches her a little ballet mime on a Lakeland hillside, and Nona practises the gestures long after she's gone.

Life gets harder before it gets better. Nona is sent to an orphanage in Newcastle, where a big boy called Tommy Bates bullies her every night. Then a runaway boy named Jude turns up and puts a stop to it (in the playground, in front of everyone!).

It's a lovely read if your reader is ballet-mad. There's a real sense of the backstage world, with the painted scenery, the dusty ropes and the dressing rooms of the stars. And the Lake District scenes are beautiful.

Before you hand it over, a few things to know. Two deaths happen right at the start, both quickly told. The bullying is cruel, with arm-twisting and a little girl made to kneel in the mud. And the book uses old words for Nona's disabilities that we wouldn't use now, with nurses and strangers recoiling from her face. Your reader might want to talk about that.

For a child who loves an underdog, though, Nona is easy to root for. She's gentle and brave, and the moment she stands up in that ward is a proper lump-in-the-throat scene.

What to read next

If they love all the behind-the-scenes theatre, try Lorna Hill's Back-stage, told by a girl who grows up in the wings of a small London variety theatre where her mother dances the dying swan.