If it were just a quest for cultural redress, the result might have been a dusty scroll of the Swans’ ballet bona fides. It’s by getting personal that it leaps high ... All of this is absorbing. Yet it’s the odd details that shine brightest ... Precisely because there’s so much meaning and humanity in this kind of minutiae, it has been methodically clipped from stories of Black women’s lives.
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.
Engaging and insightful ... Their individual stories are woven into a powerful narrative of professional triumphs and personal challenges that celebrates Black excellence in ballet.
Valby’s extensive interviews with the dancers lend an intimacy to the narrative, the details of their lives elevated and their perspectives clearly observed. The women of the 152nd Street Black Ballet Legacy Council are determined to bring their story out of obscurity. In The Swans of Harlem, they become unforgettable.
Valby meticulously untangles the prejudices woven into the dance world and analyzes the politics of establishing a Black ballet company amid a period of backlash to the civil rights movement ... A captivating corrective to an often-whitewashed history.
While [Valby's] decision to begin and end the book with Misty Copeland’s widespread misidentification as the first Black prima ballerina detracts from the dynamic, tumultuous, and inspiring journey of the five central ballerinas, the book is deeply researched and full of heart.
