Book Review of Taking Flight by Michaela Deprince
Children's Books
'Taking Flying,' by Michaela DePrince with Elaine DePrince
"It's a phenomenon I'm even hither," says Michaela DePrince in "First Position," the 2011 documentary about aspiring ballet dancers. "Everywhere y'all looked, you saw someone dice." She wears a tutu and pointe shoes, about to go onstage, a moving picture of straight-backed ballerina calm. But the story she tells — at present in greater detail in her inspiring Y.A. memoir, "Taking Flight" — is one of nearly unimaginable turmoil and out-of-the-blue skillful fortune, much similar the fairy-tale dances she now performs.
Built-in Mabinty Bangura in war-ravaged Sierra Leone in 1995, DePrince suffered more in her first iv years than most children who will encounter this volume could ever understand. When she was most 3, rebels killed her beloved father at the diamond mine where he worked; her female parent died of affliction and starvation soon after. Because of her precocious intelligence, also as the peel status vitiligo, her brutal uncle thought she was a bad-luck "devil child" and brought her to an orphanage. There she became No. 27, the least favored child among a pretty unfortunate coiffure.
Perhaps mindful of potential immature readers, or perhaps simply too traumatized, DePrince describes her early years in almost emotionless linguistic communication. But there is horror plenty. When the orphans are forced to flee to nearby Guinea, she writes, they trekked past "hundreds of dead bodies . . . sprawled on the ground with their eyes and mouths open in terror."
DePrince brought just i treasure with her on this journey, a page from a magazine she had plant showing a "white lady . . . wearing a very short, glittering pink skirt that stuck out all around her." That ballerina photo, she writes, was one of the but things "that reminded me I was alive," and information technology was practically the first thing she showed her adoptive mother when they met.
The details of the adoption process are frustratingly fuzzy, but perhaps only an developed reader would care. Every bit DePrince writes, the orphans were told that they had been matched with American families — all but poor, spotted No. 27, whom no one wanted. And here is where some other hero of this volume appears. DePrince has an amazing story to tell, and without her seemingly selfless mother and co-author, Elaine DePrince, she wouldn't be here to tell information technology. Elaine DePrince had been gear up to accept Mabinty Suma, merely at the last minute took Mabinty Bangura as well. So at age 4, sick and malnourished, both little Mabintys, best friends already, notice themselves transplanted to a comfortable, loving home in New Jersey and renamed Michaela and Mia.
Michaela DePrince'southward joyous descriptions of her new life in America will remind teenagers of all they accept for granted — machines to make clean everything! Grocery carts brimming with food! Toilets! The volume might have benefited from a fuller portrait of her parents, who lost three sons to hemophilia and H.I.V.-tainted blood and eventually adopted a total of six girls from Africa. Instead, the second half of the volume takes the reader deep into Ballet World.
In America, Michaela devotes herself to her dream of becoming a dancer. She progresses from dancing Polichinelle in "The Nutcracker" to dancing through injuries in competitions. In this rarefied world, she must learn to deal non only with jealousy and bluffing, only too with racism. "Where are the black ballerinas?" she asks her mother subsequently watching "The Nutcracker." I day she overhears a dance mom say: "Blackness girls merely shouldn't exist dancing ballet. They're likewise athletic." She resolves to be truthful to herself and non permit "anything get in the way of my goals."
That language may be trite, only readers will be moved by her grit and passion. Today, at 19, DePrince is a member of the Dutch National Ballet, a classical ballerina just like the 1 in that long-ago magazine — and proof that a girl from the unlikeliest of places might some day jeté all the way onto eye stage.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/taking-flight-by-michaela-deprince-with-elaine-deprince.html
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