A dancer's life far from typical

Taking Flight

From War Orphan
to Star Ballerina

By Michaela DePrince, with

Elaine DePrince

Alfred A. Knopf Books for Young Readers. 249 pp. $16.99

Ages 12 and up

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Ellen Dunkel

There's more than a little bit of Malala Yousafzai in ballerina Michaela DePrince.

The dancer who was born in Sierra Leone and raised by adoptive parents in Cherry Hill is now a professional in one of the world's top companies, the Dutch National Ballet.

But like the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Pakistan, Michaela was born in a country filled with political strife, where girls were neither celebrated nor regularly educated, to parents who adored and believed in her and struggled to give her everything.

The parallels are striking in Taking Flight, a gripping, often emotional young adult memoir that Michaela, born Mabinty Bangura in Sierra Leone, wrote with her adoptive American mother, Elaine DePrince.

While the Taliban terrorized Malala's region of Pakistan, for Michaela, it was the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front who killed innocent people. One day, they shot everyone working in a diamond mine, including her father.

Her uncle took in Michaela and her mother but he was not interested in schooling the girl, who born with vitiligo, a pigment disorder that speckled her abdomen and raised superstitious fears. When Michaela's mother got sick and also died, the uncle unceremoniously dumped Michaela at an orphanage.

Life there wasn't much better. The children were numbered 1 to 27 and given food and favors in that order. Michaela, then Mabinty, was 27. Her best friend, also named Mabinty, was 26. War found them there, too, and eventually the entire orphanage evacuated first to Guinea and then Ghana on the way to getting the children adopted by American parents. The two Mabintys were adopted together.

Before the evacuation, Michaela discovered a treasure: a beautiful picture of a ballerina from an old magazine had blown against the gate of the orphanage. Michaela's ballet dreams were born.

In the United States, where The Inquirer reported several times on her adoption and ballet talent, Michaela's struggles were different: family dynamics, losing a brother, the prejudices of an art accustomed to white swans, moving away from family to train in her art.

Michaela found the sort of fame few dancers ever achieve while still a teenager when a filmmaker put her in a ballet documentary called First Position.

Michaela was ready to join a company just before American Ballet Theatre, where she trained, and one of its stars, Misty Copeland, launched an initiative to bring more nonwhite dancers into the spotlight. It took her some time to land a job.

Michaela's story is engrossing and well told. It is light on the ballet, though, making it less of a dance book than young fans may hope to read.