Children’s book reviews: From sacrifices for ballet, to dinosaur adventures, and war

Pet O’Connell rounds up a selection of the latest children’s books, including a tale of the sacrifices required to succeed in a Russian ballet school, fun for dinosaur-obsessed children, and a story of young lives changed utterly by needless war

Above from left: Author of ‘Bluebird’ Harriet Parsons; Jen Wallace has released the third book in her dinosaur series, and Eoin Colfer collaborates once again with Andrew Donkin and Giovanni Rigano.

Bluebird by Harriet Parsons (O’Brien Press, €11.99)

“My school not fun. My school not play,” warns Madame Volkova. “To be accepted to my school, to train to be a dancer, there is a price to pay. Ballet means sacrifice.”

Hope is prepared to make the sacrifice, to leave Dublin and her adoptive parents, making the 700-mile train journey across Russia on the Trans–Siberian Express to the edge of the Ural Mountains. 

She is willing to pay the price to achieve her ballet dream, even if that means submitting to the harsh regime of the Pavlovgrad State Choreographic Institute, where Madame Volkova routinely belittles and even physically injures her students in pursuit of perfection.

When Hope and her friend Emily arrive at the ballet school as foreign students, their excitement is as palpable as their apprehension. 

“Lambs to the slaughter” is how Madame Volkova’s ballerina daughter Yulia sees them, and she is the ultimate authority on her mother’s draconian methods.

Madame Volkova makes a favourite of pretty, curly-haired Emily, baiting the less confident Hope and stirring in her feelings of jealousy at the apparent ease with which her friend achieves success.

Over time, Yulia becomes a guiding light for Hope, in whom she recognises something special, and whose Russian adventure has a more complex subplot than Emily’s. 

For Hope, this is a return to the country of her birth, about which she remembers nothing, having been adopted by her Irish parents from a Russian orphanage.

The girls’ arrival comes just weeks after the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, and compounding the severity of the ballet school regime and biting cold of the Russian winter is the shortage of many foods, with lengthy queues forming outside shops whenever goods become available.

With meagre meals and only primitive washing facilities, the experience comes as a culture shock for the Irish friends, though one tempered by the significant attractions of the male Russian dancers they encounter at the school.

Narrated by Hope with occasional contributions from Yulia, Bluebird is an intriguing mix of social history, friendship novel, and teen romance, with echoes of the adopted Fossil sisters of Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes.

Hope is full of self-doubt and prone to mistakes, her teenage emotions fluctuating constantly. 

But if her jealousy of Emily is her least attractive feature, it also serves to make her a flawed character to whom we can relate.

Dún Laoghaire author Harriet Parsons writes with an authenticity born from her own experience as a dancer who trained in Russia’s Perm Ballet School and went on to perform with the Moscow City Ballet.

Like Hope, she left Ireland for Russia as a teenager just after the 1991 coup attempt, sharing a room at ballet school with her friend as they endured poor food, bleak conditions, and hard work to take the chance of a lifetime.

For maximum enjoyment of this novel it certainly helps to be besotted with ballet, but a thread of intrigue surrounding Hope’s past helps carry less dance-obsessed readers through her gruelling schedule of arabesques and pirouettes.

Project Dinosaur: Top Secret by Jen Wallace (Little Island, €9.99)

First there was the dinosaur pie on special offer at BuyMart, that somehow turned Rory into a dinosaur; then it was Oleg’s dodgy BuyMart camera, which when operating on Dino Mode had the same transformational effect on anyone in the frame.

Now, in the third book of Cork author Jen Wallace’s dino-adventure series featuring a cast of neurodivergent characters with ADHD, autism, or dyslexia, Daria takes centre stage.

Daria has a problem — one created when Oleg’s camera turned moths into tiny pterosaurs. She agrees to hide the ‘pterys’ in her bedroom, which is not a great plan.

For one thing, Daria has autism and her bedroom was her safe space until the pterys began multiplying at a rapid rate, requiring all her time and attention to keep them in sardines and cat food. 

For another, they produce vast quantities of very smelly poo, which attracts the attention of her granny, who in an attempt to air the room, lets the pterys out of the window.

That’s not the only thing Daria has to worry about. 

There’s the small matter of the mosasaurus that Oleg’s camera has created in the pond at the local garden centre. 

Plus the fact that the three children are being watched by a nosy professor on the trail of a dinosaur research project.

With the aid of Alan O’Rourke’s illustrations, Wallace, who was diagnosed in adulthood with ADHD and autism, creates the perfect scenario for dinosaur-obsessed children, where they can become cretaceous-era creatures and raarh to their hearts’ content while releasing their inner deinonychus.

Dyslexia-friendly type, humour, rip-roaring action, and gallons of dino-poop are ingredients for success with a seven-plus readership in this tale of acceptance and unconditional friendship.

War by Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin, and illustrated by Giovanni Rigano (Hodder, €18.99)

War: Not a topic many of us would usually choose for a children’s book, yet as the terrifying reality for far too many young people today, it is an awful truth that cannot be ignored.

As the creators of this graphic novel point out, it is children “who have the least to do with the causes of military conflicts and war, but, tragically, they are often the most affected by them”.

Released in August, this is the third collaboration between Artemis Fowl author, Wexford’s Eoin Colfer and Andrew Donkin, with illustrator Giovanni Rigano, following on from the powerful Illegal and Global.

Their setting is an unnamed city where teenager Kat sees her world, and everyone else’s, turned upside down as tanks arrive on the streets and bombs rain down. 

Public belief that talk of war is ‘sabre rattling’ and that nothing will happen quickly turns to the realisation for Kat that she won’t be sitting her school chemistry test, sports matches have been permanently called off, and “it feels like the rest of our lives could get cancelled”.

When the house of one of Kat’s schoolmates is destroyed in a blast, the arguments over whether to flee or stay cease and her family gather a few portable possessions, leaving their home behind.

Though her mother and sister board a bus to safety, Kat’s father is detained by the invading forces and she makes a split-second decision to remain behind in the war-ravaged city and find him.

On the other side of the conflict is young army conscript Adam, who is homesick for his farm and family and writes euphemistically to tell his mother “we are off to save lives and liberate our neighbours”.

As his story and Kat’s intersect, their fictional narratives and Rigano’s darkly chilling illustrations bring home the very real horror of conflict as their young lives are changed utterly by a needless war.