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After reading Thursday's Children and Listen to the Nightengale, I inspected my bookcases and pulled out any books featuring ballet that I had not yet read. Hence, Beginner's Luck.
Three orphan siblings living in gloomy obscurity with an unfriendly aunt who hates performing arts discover that their father was an actor, their mother was a dancer, and they have a living aunt who's an actress. An absurd pile-up of wild coincidences that reminded me of the immortal line "And then the hand of fate stepped in" enables them to start a new life with a pantomime troupe.
There are definite echoes of Ballet Shoes. The oldest, Victoria, starts with no particular ambitions but is a competent dancer and it's hinted may be a good actress, the middle, Jenny, is a very talented ballerina and a small diva, and the youngest, James, is a hilarious child prone to impromptu recitals of a weird poem about a venerable ancestor, getting rolled up in a carpet and smuggled aboard a train, and getting a bear mask stuck on his head.
The pantomime troupe elements are fun but not given anything like the depth or details of anything by Godden or Streatfeild. But it's a very charming and funny in that particular style of 1930s-1950s British children's literature, and if you like that generally you will like this. It's very thoroughly out of print but I see affordable copies in online bookstores.
Oriel Malet was the pen name of Lady Auriel Rosemary Malet Vaughan (!) who had a thirty-year friendship with the much older Daphne du Maurier, who she met at a party, and published a volume of their correspondence. She also wrote novels. If this is a good sample, they were extremely charming and I would like to read more of them.
The Goodreads reviews failed to disambiguate this book from a different one with the same title, to hilarious effect. A gentle book--One of my favorite books from childhood, which I enjoyed rereading this week... A struggle rages in his soul between the way he was taught in the Catholic monastery, and the pleasure of sin that are assailing his flesh.
Three orphan siblings living in gloomy obscurity with an unfriendly aunt who hates performing arts discover that their father was an actor, their mother was a dancer, and they have a living aunt who's an actress. An absurd pile-up of wild coincidences that reminded me of the immortal line "And then the hand of fate stepped in" enables them to start a new life with a pantomime troupe.
There are definite echoes of Ballet Shoes. The oldest, Victoria, starts with no particular ambitions but is a competent dancer and it's hinted may be a good actress, the middle, Jenny, is a very talented ballerina and a small diva, and the youngest, James, is a hilarious child prone to impromptu recitals of a weird poem about a venerable ancestor, getting rolled up in a carpet and smuggled aboard a train, and getting a bear mask stuck on his head.
The pantomime troupe elements are fun but not given anything like the depth or details of anything by Godden or Streatfeild. But it's a very charming and funny in that particular style of 1930s-1950s British children's literature, and if you like that generally you will like this. It's very thoroughly out of print but I see affordable copies in online bookstores.
Oriel Malet was the pen name of Lady Auriel Rosemary Malet Vaughan (!) who had a thirty-year friendship with the much older Daphne du Maurier, who she met at a party, and published a volume of their correspondence. She also wrote novels. If this is a good sample, they were extremely charming and I would like to read more of them.
The Goodreads reviews failed to disambiguate this book from a different one with the same title, to hilarious effect. A gentle book--One of my favorite books from childhood, which I enjoyed rereading this week... A struggle rages in his soul between the way he was taught in the Catholic monastery, and the pleasure of sin that are assailing his flesh.
