Heidi Heckelbeck 7 – Heidi Heckelbeck Is Ready to Dance!

Wanda Coven's Heidi Heckelbeck Is Ready to Dance is a short school story for 6 year olds about a girl convinced there isn't one single thing she's good at.

What happens

It's the seventh Heidi Heckelbeck book, and the thing to know going in is that Heidi's a witch. So's her family. Nobody at Brewster Elementary has the faintest idea.

The school talent show is a week away and Heidi can't think of one thing she can do. Her little brother Henry can mime, which she finds deeply annoying. The whole family sit in the garden over warm peanut butter cookies and throw ideas at her, and she knocks every one of them down. Hula-hooping? Three twirls. That's her limit.

At school it gets worse. Melanie Maplethorpe, who's never nice to Heidi, announces at lunch that Heidi can't be in the show because she's a weirdo with no talent. Then she mentions she's been doing Irish dancing for four years.

So Heidi spends a few days auditioning herself. She paints her house in art and it looks lovely until she sees Natalie's, which has a porch and a flag and a dog on it. She kicks the ball as hard as she can in games and Stanley catches it. She listens to Eve sing and quietly decides not to try out.

Then her dad turns up an old shoebox in the attic. Mum's tap shoes, metal taps on the toes and heels, and they fit Heidi perfectly.

What happens next is that Heidi gets her Book of Spells out from under the bed and looks up dance. There's a tap routine in there. She mixes the potion in a plastic cup. And when somebody knocks on her bedroom door and she jumps, a good bit of it goes across the desk.

It's a very quick read, over in an afternoon, which is about right for a child who's just got confident enough to want a proper story to themselves.

The good part is that the feeling underneath it is real. Heidi isn't sad about tap dancing. She's sad because everybody round her seems to be good at one thing and she can't find hers. Plenty of six year olds are already having that exact thought.

What to read next

If this one goes down well, there's Heidi Heckelbeck and the Cookie Contest, an earlier one this book still refers back to. She enters the school contest with the family chocolate chunk recipe and insists on making them entirely by herself.