Little Ballet Star

This book is fascinating to my granddaughters ages 3 and 5 years. We first found it and checked it out of the library. The girls were so fascinated by it that I bought it for them, even though we try to limit too much pink and "girlie" stuff in books. They like books in general, but liked this one even more than usual and last time we read it, they pretended they were ballerinas and made up a whole show!

This book has been my 3 1/2 yr old daughter's favorite recently, and my 5 1/2 yr old son enjoys it, too. The story allows you to see "behind the scenes" of a real ballet, and the pictures are fantastic. They are very detailed - in the first picture, for example, of the ballet from the exterior, you can notice a ballet dancer going in through the stage entrance in her street clothes and big marketing posters of the main character's aunt (who is featured later in the story) gracing the building to entice people to come to the ballet. The story and pictures really seem to make the ballet seem like a magical thing to young readers, and the book has inspired us to start talking about going to see The Nutcracker ballet together as a family. We like this book enough to seek out others by this author and others by this illustrator.