BALLET SHOES

A beloved 1936 children’s novel about three dancing sisters is reimagined as a picture book.

This retelling by the nephew of the original story’s author finds the Fossil sisters—Pauline, Petrova, and Posy—living in what seems to be a guest house in London. Each girl was a foundling; all are pale-skinned but differ in hair color and provenance. When the sisters are informed that they will be learning ballet, acting, and singing at the Children’s Academy of Dance and Stage Training, they fix on the idea that they will all be famous one day, and they promise one another that they’ll be “the very best that we can be.” As it happens, each sister ends up landing on a different passion: Posy is a dancing dynamo, Pauline excels at acting, and Petrova indulges her talent for fixing things by working at a garage. (A final spread resembling scrapbook pages reveals their futures.) The follow-your-own-path message is encouraging, but the book’s small events don’t add up to much of a story, and readers will be left with questions, likely because the narrative has been condensed. Most pressingly: Who is responsible for the girls’ care? Coy’s art, which appears to have been created with watercolors, tries to honor the original story’s era, but when two sisters say “Yuck!,” the spell is broken.

Probably just for dance enthusiasts and fans of the original.