On pointe
For as long as she can remember, Clare and her family have had a dream: Someday Clare will be a dancer in City Ballet Company. For ten long years Clare has been taking ballet lessons, watching what she eats, giving up friends and a social life, and practicing until her feet bleed -- all for the sake of that dream. And now, with the audition for City Ballet Company right around the corner, the dream feels so close.
But what if the dream doesn't come true? The competition for the sixteen spots in the company is fierce, and many won't make it. Talent, dedication, body shape, size -- everything will influence the outcome. Clare's grandfather says she is already a great dancer, but does she really have what it takes to make it into the company? And if not, then what?
Told through passionate and affecting poems in Clare's own voice, On Pointe soars with emotion as it explores what it means to reach for a dream -- and the way that dreams can change as quickly and suddenly as do our lives.
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For the most part, I don't mind novels in verse. This was one of my Teen Book Club's picks for May, and I was glad to read it. I liked Clare and Grandpa. Both go through major life changes and we get to see what happens, but most importantly, we get to hear what Clare thinks about what is happening. And that was where the prose really worked for me. I was confused on a few points (Clare's age, for example). I had pictured her being in her early teens, but a line about “in several years I will be a Spartan like my mother” (which refers to the high school) threw me. Was Clare much younger than I originally pictured her? And yet she travels through town and meets people for coffee? It would explain why she never drove....hmm. Anyway. I thought it was a glimpse (and that's it, a glimpse) into the world of kids preparing to enter a professional ballet company. The only real hint we have of what other characters are thinking is the beginning when each character gets a statement. The mother is a little hard to handle in this story (all the mothers, in fact). I worry that there is not enough about the ballet world that readers do not already know. Yes we know they purge. Yes we know it's competitive. And please, all of my ballet knowledge comes from VC Andrews and The Baby Sitters Club. But what is new is the idea that one should have a back up plan in the great chance that things do not work out the way the dancer wants them too (this would be true for ball players, singers, actors, etc) and that is NOT laid out in the book. So, I am rather disappointed there. Overall, not a bad read, but not THE ballet book readers have been waiting for.