Kiki Macadoo and the Graveyard Ballerinas by Colette Sewall ( Amazon.com )

Owl Hollow Press, 2020

ISBN-13: 978-1945654558

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition

Kiki Macadoo, age eleven, and her teenage sister Alison, are going to a special ballet summer camp housed in a Gothic castle in a remote area surrounded by dense forest. Kiki loves ballet but is terrible at it, while Alison is very talented. While both of them are excited about camp, Kiki is nervous, and Alison is bummed because she’ll be spending the summer away from her boyfriend, Dylan.

Despite the camp’s setting, the kids seem pretty normal– they’re there because they want to excel in dance. Sewall writes naturally about ballet and dance, without making the terminology intimidating. Kiki is placed in the lowest dance class, with 8 year olds, but she’s lucky in that she has a pretty good relationship with Alison, her roommate is kind and friendly even though she’s a much better dancer, and the dance teacher is understanding and helpful. The camp director, Madame Dupree, is elderly, forgetful, and a bit eccentric (there’s a subplot where her son’s fiance attempts to have her committed so he can sell the property to developers, but it doesn’t really go anywhere), but she’s also thoughtful and generous. When she learns that Alison will have her sixteenth birthday at camp, she enlists Kiki in helping plan a surprise party for Alison. It’s  refreshing to see a school story, especially one involving teenagers and middle-schoolers, where the main character isn’t bullied because of physical flaws or struggles with learning.  It’s also nice to see the conflicting feelings Kiki has about dance and about her sister– she may struggle but she perserveres.

While the campers have been forbidden from going into the forest, it doesn’t stop Kiki. Her lessons end earlier than Alison’s or her roommate’s, leaving Kiki plenty of time to explore. One of the boys at the school, Oliver, lives on the grounds and tells her she needs to be careful because fairies and spirits live in the woods (Oliver isn’t mocked for dancing; we have come a long way since Oliver Button Is a Sissy). At first she doesn’t believe him, but it turns out that Kiki is one of a rare few who can see them, because she has “ghost eyes”, two different-colored eyes. Kiki and Oliver become friends and explore the forest together (it is almost a character in its own right), and between Oliver’s stories and hints dropped by Madame Dupree, Kiki learns that in addition to harmless spirits, there are some dangerous ones as well. The wilis, water sylphs who died of broken hearts while at ballet camp, draw in any young woman with a broken heart and force her to dance to her death, at which time she becomes one of them. There is a graveyard filled with the bodies of girls who died dancing and became wilis.

The surprise party for Alison does not end well. Alison’s boyfriend shows up with bad grace and she discovers he’s seeing another girl; broken-hearted, she runs into the forest where she is drawn in to the wilis’ dance. As terrifying as they are, it is up to Kiki to break her sister away from the wilis’ spell.

I really liked the author’s choice to make the wilis her dangerous spirits. They are part of Slavic folklore and are not commonly known, but they do appear in the ballet Giselle, which is tragic and terrifying. Giselle is maybe not as well known to the average kid as The Nutcracker or Swan Lake, but that makes the story extra cool in integrating the ballet theme into the story.

As it is a middle grade book, things end well, but the path to getting there has its frightening moments, and definitely magical ones. The door is left open to a sequel, and I’ll be interested to see if one happens and, if it does, where it takes Kiki, Alison, and Oliver next. Recommended for ages 8-13.