By: Lily LaMotte
Kristy Dempsey, the author of the picture book A Dance Like Starlight, won this year's Golden Kite Award given by SCBWI. Her speech at this summer's SCBWI Summer Conference in Los Angeles wowed me with its lyricism and use of language. So when I opened A Dance Like Starlight, I had very high expectations. I was not disappointed.
With the very first spread of A Dance Like Starlight, Kristy Dempsey tells the story of a young ballerina's dream of dancing onstage in the Harlem of the 1950's with beautiful language, rhythm, and metaphor. The lamp heads of streetlights become "pin-top faces". She then brings the reader into the young girl's life by invoking a universal emotion. The young girl searches the smoky city sky for a star to wish upon. What reader, whether child or adult, has not wished for some dream to come true? We are ready to root for her dreams.
Kristy Dempsey then sets up conflict immediately with the third spread. Mama doesn't believe in wishing on stars. Mama believes in hope although she warns that hope is hard work. While that may be true, it is the girl's own dreaming that moves her to imitate the students at the ballet school where she waits for her Mama to finish the sewing and mending work. It is a combination of dreaming and working that gets her noticed by the ballet master. After that, it is hope that makes her "...try harder to stand taller, to leap higher, to dance better."
And yet, despite hoping and dreaming and working hard, could a colored girl ever become a prima ballerina in the 1950's--a time when ballerinas were excluded from dance troupes because of the color of their skin? Her hopes are buoyed when Miss Janet Collins becomes the first colored prima ballerina at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1951, four years before Marian Anderson's Metropolitan Opera debut.
Mama takes the young girl to the opera even though the ticket is costly. Once they are outside the opera house, the young girl feels small against the huge building and the fancy people but when she sees Janet Collins dance onstage, she feels as if she were the one leaping and gliding. Her hope "wells up and spills over, dripping all my dreams onto my Sunday dress." She no longer needs to wish upon a star because she has hope.
Floyd Cooper's mixed media paintings beautifully and sensitively evokes the young girl's emotions with it's muted color palette and soft edges.
A Dance Like Starlight is a book that every young dreamer should read.
A Dance Like Starlight is a book that every young dreamer should read.
Images used under Creative Commons from Amazon.com, Boxykitten.com. and Thesoulpitt.com.