Clair-de-Lune

Despite its (minor) flaws, Golds' story is a pleasure to read. It is the story of a girl who discovers life's greatest gift - the gift of love - and the ability she has inside herself to embrace that gift as she overcomes fear. It is sweet and delicate in the best of ways - written for girls and women (okayokay, men, too) who love beauty & dancing & appreciate the difficulties of shyness (or should). Golds does use the expression "Ah!" way too much, and is in many ways suspiciously reminiscent of DiCamillo's "The Tale of Despereaux." I agree with the above review about the recent wave of sentimentality in children's literature, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. This book is ultimately absorbing, lovely, and deeply touching.

Clair-de Lune is a young ballet student living in an old city many years past. Her mother and grandmother were ballet dancers. In fact, Clair-de-Lune's mother, La Lune (which means "the moon") was a famous, much loved ballerina who died at a very young age while dancing on the stage. She left her baby daughter to be raised by a strict grandmother in the attic of an old and mystical apartment building just behind the theatre. Ever since the night of La Lune's death, Clair-de-Lune has never spoken a word. Everyone believes it is because of the tragic loss of her young mother that the child's lips and voice do not utter any sounds. However, Clair-de-Lune speaks a special language. "When she was dancing, her arms and legs spoke, and her hands and feet spoke, and her body and the carriage of her head spoke, too. And she felt that just a little of the weight of her heart, the weight of things unsaid, would be lifted." And so Clair-de-Lune loves everything about the dance because it offers her the chance to discover her own story, the story of how she came to be a young dancer raised by her grandmother in a rickety apartment building six stories high. The days of Clair-de-Lune are strictly spent taking ballet class from Monsieur Dupoint (whose studio happens to be on the third floor of the apartment building), studying practical school subjects at home with her grandmother, and running brief errands to the market. It is the regimented life of a ballerina-in-training overseen with great care and consternation by her grandmother, until the little girl who cannot speak encounters a little mouse who can speak very well! Bonaventure is a brave talking, dancing mouse who leads Clair-de-Lune on an adventure where she meets a fanciful array of characters who help her learn about true love and how love is the reason for life, especially her own. Cassandra Golds masters the difficult literary feat of mixing fictitious reality with fantasy. Some readers may be put off by the blurry lines between the factual and the fantastic, but Golds has truly captured in writing the whimsy that every ballet production relies on: genuine people dancing magical stories and making the fanciful appear truly alive. --- Reviewed by Joy Held