This is less biography & more a poetic ode to Anna Pavlova's artistic life. For biographical information, you must look to the author's notes & the sources in the bibliography. Pavlova is a lovely and interesting person to read about, and Julie Morstad's illustrations are wonderful to look at, but I find Laurel Snyder's appraisal of Pavlova's thinness & frailty a bit troublesome. The world of young girls could do with a lot less inculcations of snow- & feather-lightness as aspirations in the media they consume, seeing as how many grow up to lose body-confidence & fall prey to pressures to be thin & perfect. Snyder paints Pavlova's litheness as having paved the way to today's standards of thinness in the modern ballet, as if it were a groundbreaking accomplishment in itself! What a tacky message to send to young girl readers. ( )

American author Laurel Snyder and Canadian illustrator Julie Morstad join forces in this lovely picture-book about Anna Pavlova, the celebrated Russian prima ballerina. Inspired by a trip to the ballet as a young girl, Anna dreams of becoming a dancer herself, always attuned to the music of the world around her. Eventually, after some delay, she does attend ballet school, and quickly rises to become one of the world's most famous dancers...

As someone who was familiar with Pavlova's name but not her life story, I picked up Swan: The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova with some interest, particularly as I have enjoyed other works illustrated by Morstad. Not unexpectedly, I found it a gorgeous book, visually speaking, and thought the mixed media artwork was superb. The narrative, on the other hand, was less informative, and more impressionistic, telling its subject's story only in the broadest sense, and filling in more details in the afterword. This wasn't entirely satisfactory to me, as I would have preferred a more detailed main narrative, paired with these beautiful illustrations. Tastes vary, of course, so other readers might feel differently, but for me this was stronger visually than textually, and my star rating is more for Morstad than Snyder. Recommended to young ballet dancers and enthusiasts, and to admirers of Julie Morstad's artwork. ( )

This picture book biography of Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova is artfully done. The text is poetic and lyrical, "dancing" all over the page. I love, love, love the illustrations. With her success as a dancer, Anna is able to travel the world and take on many roles, her most famous being the swan. As talented as she was, Anna's biggest achievement was that she made ballet accessible to everyone, not just the rich. ( )

This book is about this story of Anna Pavlova. It talks about her as a little girl and her accomplishments. It's a brief look through what her life was from beginning to the end, and how she contributed to the world.

The writing and illustrations themselves are evocative of Anna Pavlova herself! Very beautiful and could be a great inspiration for young dancers. ( )