Nada Curcija-Prodanovic

When Lana comes to the State Ballet School in Belgrade, the young girl has difficulty fitting in at first, and finds herself being given the cold shoulder by many of her fellow pupils, who seem to regard her as a bit of a prig. But slowly, with the help of her first friend, Katia, and also through her own honesty, kind heart, and obvious dedication to dance, Lana makes a place for herself at the school, and wins the affection and admiration of the students and teachers. Only the sullen Ljiljana, who begins to have problems of her own, remains hostile. Throughout her first year, with its concerts and recitals, Lana steadily improves in her ballet, and begins to move to the top of her class. Her enthusiasm for the local dance, during a summer visit to an island in the Adriatic, helps to save a tradition in danger of being lost. But just as everything seems to be going so well, tragedy strikes, in the form of a terrible accident. Will Lana ever dance again, or will her well-meaning doctor, mother, teachers and fellow students prove correct, in their belief that her dream of becoming a ballerina must now be forsaken...?

Chosen as our June selection, in The International Children's Book Club to which I belong, where we attempt to read a children's book from a different country each month, Ballerina is a book I first discovered while reading Sue Sims and Hilary Clare's massive The Encyclopaedia of School Stories: Volume 1: The Encyclopaedia of Girls' School Stories, and is written by Serbian translator and author Nada Ćurčija Prodanović, who also taught ballet at the Belgrade Ballet School. It is not, contrary to my initial belief before picking up the book itself, written in Serbian, but rather in English - a language in which Prodanović was fluent - making its smooth prose, and immensely engaging story all the more outstanding of an achievement on the author's part. I was immediately involved in the heroine's story, and stayed involved throughout, putting down the book with a desire to read the sequel, Ballet on Tour. It struck me, while reading, that the picture offered here, of young dancers from all over what was then Yugoslavia - Lana herself comes from Macedonia, Katia and Angela are from Slovenia, a new girl (never met in the narrative) comes from Bosnia, whilst the rest are (I assume?) Serbian and Croatian - working together as friends, was terribly poignant, given the events that would overtake that part of the world, a few decades later. All in all, an excellent book, one I wholeheartedly recommend to all young ballet enthusiasts, as well as to anyone looking for children's stories set in the Balkans.… (más)