Beautifully and gently illustrated by Ella Okstad, Ballerina Dreams is the younger-reader edition of Michaela DePrince’s highly moving memoir, Hope in a Ballet Shoe.

The book is available in English, isiZulu, isiXhosa and Afrikaans.

About the book:

One windy day, a magazine blew down the road. I reached out and caught it. A pretty picture of a woman was on the front cover of the magazine. She wore a short pink dress that stuck out around her in a circle. She looked very happy.

At the age of three, Michaela DePrince found a photo of a ballerina that changed her life. She was living in an orphanage in Sierra Leone at the time, but was soon adopted by a family and brought to America. Michaela never forgot the photo of the dancer she once saw, and decided to make her dream of becoming a ballerina come true. She has been dancing ever since, and after a spell as a principal dancer in New York, now dances for the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam.

About the author:

Michaela DePrince was born in Sierra Leone and adopted by an American family. She graduated from the American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School in New York, and is a dancer with the Dutch National Ballet. She travels between Amsterdam and New York City, where she lives with her family

Categories Africa Fiction International

Tags Ballerina Dreams Hope in a Ballet Shoe Jonathan Ball Publishers Michaela DePrince