Dancing Through Fire

by Kathryn Lasky

Like the captivating bestseller, GIRL WITH A PEARL EARRING, this exciting new series explores the stories behind the girls featured in some of the world's most dazzling paintings. Welcome to 19th... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 043971009X
• ISBN13: 9780439710091
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Scholastic
• Length: 172 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 8 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 3 to 7

Customer Reviews

Excellent historical novel in a promising new series.

This book is part of a new historical fiction series called Portraits. This series imagines what the lives of young girls in famous paintings might have been like. This particular book is based on one of the ballet paintings of Degas. Sylvie Bertrand is a young girl who is studying to be a ballerina at the Paris Opera Ballet School in 1870. Due to poverty, her mother had to leave the ballet to marry years ago and now she is living through her hopes and dreams for Sylvie - if she could not become a famous ballerina, then Sylvie must. Although Sylvie likes the ballet, sometimes she wonders if she will ever have a life beyond her mother's dreams. Her older sister, Chantal, hated the way her mother lived through her and decided to rebel, pretending to be lazy so she would be forced to leave the ballet. When the Franco-Prussian War breaks out and Paris falls under siege, Sylvie gets a glimpse of the real world where there is sickness and starvation. She struggles with how it contrasts with the perfect fantasy world of the ballet. As the situation in Paris worsens, Sylvie decides she must do something to help and in her quest learns even more about the harshness of the real world, but she also learns that ballet is not just her mother's dream but hers as well. I really loved Kathryn Lasky's books for the Dear America and Royal Diaries series, and this book was just as good. This is a very promising new historical series and I definitely look forward to the other books. I'd recommend this book to readers who enjoyed the author's other historical novels, and to new readers who like historical fiction as well.