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The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History
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61
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
86/100Critics
36/100Scholars
Author:
Karen Valby
Publisher:
Pantheon
Date:
April 30, 2024
The forgotten story of a pioneering group of five Black ballerinas and their fifty-year sisterhood.
What The Reviewers Say
If it were just a quest for cultural redress, the result might have been a dusty scroll of the Swans’ ballet bona fides. It’s by getting personal that it leaps high.
Valby’s group biography, The Swans of Harlem, has a singular purpose: to write them back into history. She does so with righteous passion but in a narrative mishmash that jumps between third- and first-person, and includes some cloying comments from family members.
Thanks in part to her book, that history can be told with greater fidelity—a history to inspire dancers and dance enthusiasts alike..
Engaging and insightful.
