My favorite books by Jean Estoril are her 'Drina" books but her other books are quite good too. I like her sweet and somewhat dated style, they are basically the perfect English school girl stories. I never did ballet but I have always been obsessed with it and I enjoy the window into that life that reading a Jean Estoril book gives me. ( )

After her mother's sudden and unexpected death, Joan Bradshaw comes to live with her maternal uncle, aunt and cousins in London in this quietly moving tale of finding a new family, leaving behind her childhood home in Lancashire. Quiet and proud, and still reeling from the terrible grief of her recent loss, Joan feels that she will never belong in the Garland household, for the Garlands are a "ballet family." Father Edwin is the orchestra conductor for the world-famous Thorburg Company, where mother Mona is a famous prima ballerina and eldest sister Pelagia is a dancer in the corps de ballet. Younger siblings Edward, Anne and Delphine, in the meantime, are all studying ballet at the Thorburg School. Their entire world revolves around ballet, something Joan finds absolutely foreign at first. Slowly though, through trial and error, Joan and the Garlands become better acquainted, and when Joan's talent for both piano composition and drawing are revealed, it transpires that she may have more in common with "the ballet family" than anyone had imagined...

I always enjoy Mabel Esther Allan's work, finishing each new book wondering why I don't read more of her, given how prolific she was! The Ballet Family was originally published in 1963, under Allan's own name, but the edition I own was published in 1989 under the pseudonym 'Jean Estoril,' which Allan often used for her ballet fiction, most notably, the Drina Ballerina series. Perhaps it was reissued this way in order to draw in fans of the Drina books? However that may be, I enjoyed the tale here immensely, and felt that Allan, as always, had a sensitive appreciation for characters who feel out of step with those around them. In her school stories this is usually the "new girl" who must find her feet as a pupil, but here it is the new girl in the family, and the adjustments are necessary on all sides. I really appreciated the way in which Allan dealt with regional prejudices within British society at the time, and the way in which she gently challenged the Garlands' assumptions about what people in Northern England would be like, their feelings of unconscious superiority, and surprise that not everyone would value the more sophisticated London over less 'urbane' areas of the country. It would have been all too easy to make the Garlands horrible snobs, but they're nothing of the kind - not even spoiled Delphine! Rather, they're thoroughly decent people, who really make an effort. This makes the eventual understanding that develops between them and their northern cousin all the more satisfactory. I sped through this one very quickly, enjoying the characters, the story and the setting (geography is VERY important in Allan's work!), and had no sooner finished it than I was reaching for the sequel, The Ballet Family Again. What stronger recommendation could there be? ( )