Zombelina loves to dance. She moonwalks with mummies and boogies with bats. She spins like a specter and glides like a ghost and loves to dance for her family the most. When Zombelina enrolls in a ballet class for real girls, her dancing gives everyone the chills! But when her first recital brings on a case of stage fright, her zombie moans and ghoulish groans scare her audience away. Only her devoted family’s cheers, in their special spooky way, help Zombelina dance the ballet debut of her dreams.
Introducing the most adorable zombie to ever grace the dance floor, Kristyn Crow’s pitch-perfect rhyme and Molly Idle’s charmingly spook-tacular illustrations will make every reader want to sway and sashay in their own zombie trance.
Zombelina is just like so many little girls who loves to dance and dreams of being a star ballerina. In Zombelina’s case, there’s just one teensy-tiny little catch. She’s a zombie. And zombies don’t dance. Or do they?
On the surface there’s nothing all that revolutionary about Zombelina’s story. A little girl pursues a hobby that people don’t think she can do, and achieves her dreams. What I really appreciate about this charming story is its ability to blend both the girly and the macabre into a story that sweet, but not too sweet. This a pink tutu-infused story with a twist, and its positively delightful. Zombelina’s ghoulish family might not quite understand her obsession with dance, but they love her and they want her to be happy, so when she experiences a terrible case of stage fright, all the spooks and witches, goblins and monsters come out in force to cheer her on.
I was a bit saddened by Zombelina’s treatment at the hands of her fellow dancers. When Zombelina lets her inner zombie out at the grand dance performance, all of her classmates flee from the stage, and not a single child stands up for her, or with her. Their reactions might be entirely justifiable (I’d probably take for the hills too if I thought a zombie was on the loose), but it did seem a little sad, and it suggested that Zombelina might not be able to make friends with anyone who isn’t who already ghoulish to begin with. Even the dance teacher Madame Maladroit, who hails Zombelina as her finest dance student, has a bit of the dark and spooky about her, suggesting that she’s a link between the conventional and the monstrous. It might have been a fun twist to have paired Zombelina with another dance outlier, perhaps a boy, or someone with an atypical dance body type, and the two new friends could then put on their own performance, and show the other students that dancers come in all forms.
Still, I really appreciate a book that tackles an unabashedly girly subject – a little girl dreaming of being a ballerina – and shakes it up a bit with a protagonist who’s far from typical. Thanks in large part to Molly Idle’s charming illustrations, Zombelina is a little bit ghoulish, a little bit girly, and a whole lot delightful.
Zombelina
Hardcover, 32 pages
July 9, 2013 : Bloomsbury
Source: Raincoast Books
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