MixedThe Telegraph (UK)Valby’s group biography, The Swans of Harlem, has a singular purpose: to write them back into history. She does so with righteous passion but in a narrative mishmash that jumps between third- and first-person, and includes some cloying comments from family members ... [The women\'s stories] range from working with Bob Fosse and on the movie The Wiz to a backstreet abortion, an abusive marriage, a conversion to Islam and alcoholism. As a result, the book feels overcrowded ... But this feels, rightly, like the beginning of a wider conversation.
