The Ballet Dress

By Ann Stalcup

A barefoot Mary has danced to soaring ballet music from an old gramophone, in her back garden ever since she learned to walk. Her head is filled with dreams of someday becoming a ballerina. Even when she is old enough to go to school, she rushes home everyday and with brown paper wings pinned to her shoulders, she dances and dances until darkness falls. When, at last, a dance teacher comes to her small town, she learns to arabesque and plié and leap gracefully through the air. After a while she is chosen to perform a solo in a town hall concert. She is filled with both pride and anxiety. She needs a ballet dress. But there is a problem: it is wartime. When she visits a draper’s shop, she learns that there is no fabric suitable for making her dress. She is devastated. Can her dream of becoming a ballet dancer ever come true? And will her mother somehow find a way to make her a ballet dress?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781649796073

Ann Stalcup

Ann Stalcup has just retired from a lifetime of primary school teaching and has a passion for travel, art, music, dance, and picture books. After teaching in England and Canada, she moved to California in 1963 and has been writing ever since. She has eighteen published books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and nonfiction. Much of her work is inspired by her extensive travels with her teacher husband. Her over one hundred magazine articles, mostly for children, feature the life and culture of other countries. 

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