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.

Valby’s extensive interviews with the dancers lend an intimacy to the narrative, the details of their lives elevated and their perspectives clearly observed. The women of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council are determined to bring their story out of obscurity. In The Swans of Harlem, they become unforgettable..

Valby meticulously untangles the prejudices woven into the dance world and analyzes the politics of establishing a Black ballet company amid a period of backlash to the civil rights movement.

While [Valby's] decision to begin and end the book with Misty Copeland’s widespread misidentification as the first Black prima ballerina detracts from the dynamic, tumultuous, and inspiring journey of the five central ballerinas, the book is deeply researched and full of heart..