Rosa and the Special Prize (by Darcey Bussell)

(Amazon UK link)

Last Summer, while in the UK, one of the books I started reading to my five-year-old granddaughter was ‘Rosa and the Special Prize’, by Darcey Bussell. Now retired, she was the principal dancer with the Royal Ballet for some years. The book says it’s 10th in the ‘Magic Ballerina’ series, but it didn’t seem to matter much that my granddaughter hadn’t read or heard any of the previous books in the series.

Rosa is the name of the main protagonist of this story. I assume she’s about ten or eleven, though I don't think it's stated, and she’s passionate about ballet. We meet her first in a show where she takes an important role and dances extremely well. Her teacher offers her an application form for an audition at the Royal Ballet School, and Rosa is very excited until she realises that she would have to board in London. Rosa’s mother used to be a dancer but is now in a wheelchair, and appears to be a single mother, so Rosa doesn’t want to leave her.

Then the storyline changes as Rosa’s magic ballet shoes take her to another world, where King Neptune and King Tristan, usually good friends, are not speaking to each other. Neptune thinks that Tristan has stolen his trident. Rosa meets her fairy friend Nutmeg who is able to take them underwater for a while, to search for the trident.

It’s quite an exciting story, but I only read about three chapters last summer before my granddaughter decided she would rather do something else. Perhaps the story didn’t grip her. She put a bookmark in, but I assumed that was the end of it as far as I was concerned.

However, when we visited a few days ago, after reading several other shorter books, my granddaughter (now six) produced this one again. She said she had read the next chapter herself, but wanted me to finish it. So I did… and on the whole thought it a good story. As an adult I knew it was all going to turn out all right - and that Rosa’s mother would probably persuade her to apply for the audition once she got home - but as I read, I got quite caught up in the story. I was only going to read a couple of chapters, and ended up finishing the book in one sitting. Not that it's particularly long - only about 100 pages.

The writing is good, and clearly intended to appeal to young girls with an interest in fairies and/or ballet, which covers quite a large percentage of five and six-year-olds. However it seems to have a wider appeal: my eight-year-old grandson came to listen and liked it too, though he was more interested in the search for the trident and dramatic rescue scenes than he was in the final chapter, back in the real world.

I would probably have liked this very much as a young child, though it's not the kind of book I would choose to read to myself nowadays. I would recommend it, on the whole, to read aloud to children (mainly girls) of about four or five and upwards, or as an early chapter book for children starting to become fluent in reading. Having said that, I’m not inspired to look for others in the series for my granddaughter, as I suspect the storylines would be very similar.

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