Swan The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova

Swan The Life and Dance of Anna Pavlova

Author: Laurel Snyder

Illustration: Julie Morstad

Genre: Nonfiction: Biography and Informational Book

Grade Level: PreK – 5^th grade

This a biographical book about Anna Pavlova. A poor girl transforming herself into a famous ballerina that danced her way around the world. The story takes place in Russia where it is cold and snowy. Little Anna is taken to watch a ballet by her parents. As she watches the ballet, she cannot help but fall in love with the way the ballerina is dancing. The next day, Anna dances and moves every moment she gets as she is helping her mother with a laundry. She fails at first to be enrolled in a famous ballet school but the second time she tries. Everyone is astonished by the way she dances. She learns and practices ballet daily. Her hard work pays off. She becomes the leader of the famous ballet The Swan. People across the world come to see her dance. Even the royal family are enchanted by her dance moves. Anna sets herself to travel from places to places. She teaches the girls to dance at her new home but of course, she never forgets where she came from. At the end, she falls ill to cold and loses her “feather falls at last, and settles.”

The illustrations in this book are breathtaking. Though not colorful, it does a perfect job of portraying the environment of Russia as a cold and snowy place. She uses mainly white color and beige like colors in this book. If you just look at the illustrations, you will find yourself cold because of the colors that the illustrator has used. The words are scattered everywhere in the pages. The sentences are not that long so it is perfect for younger children to read this book.

Thoughts:

I loved this book. The first thing that drew me into this book was illustration and it is just fantastic. I did not even know that this was a biographical book until I searched Anna Pavlova. This might be a good book to read it to students to teach about dance and movements. I know that the little ballerinas would love this book. The book also has beautiful vocabularies that would certainly benefit on teaching to students. But part of me thinks that this book would not really be ideal to read because of how it ends. Maybe I could read the book till the end to 3^rd to 5th-grade students and just leave the last part for PreK to 2^nd grades.