Listen to the Nightengale, by Rumer Godden

Lottie, a child ballet dancer, has to find a way to balance dancing with a full life that includes other pleasures and relationships.

This begins with an amazing accidental puppy acquisition - she witnesses a boy steal a King Charles Spaniel from a pet shop, chases him, hurls her carrying case at him and knocks him down, is mistaken for the puppy's owner by bystanders, and goes with it. She falls in love with the puppy, finds that it's incredibly hard to care for a puppy when you need to do other things too, and then comes to a crisis when she's accepted at a famous ballet boarding school that doesn't allow dogs. (It's Doone's ballet school, but he and Crystal do not appear in this story, which seems to be set well after their time at the school.)

The puppy issue is resolved (the puppy is fine) halfway through the book, but Lottie continues to deal with balancing her dancing with other issues: friend troubles, enemy troubles, discovering her own inner emotional life, and changes in her family. It's a very interesting topic - how to have a life when you have a single thing that your entire life revolves around - but one which is more commonly dealt with in adult literature for obvious reasons.

I didn't love this as much as Thursday Children, probably because it's aimed at a slightly younger audience and is less complex, and because I love Doone so much, but it's very good.

It also has an amazingly iddy sequence which I have seen in many fanfics but no published novels before. ( Read more... )