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.
