Madeline Fans Will Love This

Miss Lina's Ballerinas
Written by Grace Maccarone & Illustrated by Christine Daveniere
Age Level: 2-9 Years
Published October 26, 2010

A lesson in friendship and factors

It’s Angelina Ballerina meets Madeline, with a math lesson! Can it get any better?

“In a cozy White House, in the town of Messina, eight little girls studied dance with Miss Lina.” Both the bouncy, lyrical cadence of the prose and the loose, expressive hand of the illustrations strongly evoke Ludwig Bemelmans and his beloved Madeline. And just like Miss Clavel’s brood, Miss Lina’s dancers are a devoted and close knit bunch, dancing from dawn to dusk in four lines of two. But when a ninth dancer arrives, the dancers seem to have lost their perfect rhythm. Seeing the disruption, Miss Lina swiftly rearranges her girls into three rows of three, and shows them that there’s always room for one more.

“Then eight ballerinas cried, ‘What shall we do?
With nine, we no longer make four rows of two.’ ”

This book is delightfully fun to read on its own, which is what I’m currently doing with my pink-obsessed young daughter. But it’s also wonderful for discussing friendship and welcoming newcomers, or to incorporate into an older child’s math lesson about factors. In each use case, this charming story is completely on pointe. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist a ballet pun!)