skip navigation links

Readers > Talk it Up! > Discussion guides > Dance of Sisters

Dance of Sisters by Tracey Porter

Summary

Twelve-year-old Delia Ferri doesn't remember her mother or her family the way it used to be. All she knows is that her sister, Pearl, and her father are fighting more and more. Pearl is withdrawn and angry and obsessed with witchcraft. Delia vows not to give her father anything else to worry about. The only time Delia feels important and alive is when she is dancing for Madame Elanova, a world-famous ballet instructor who calls Delia “destined.” Delia relishes the hard work required to be a ballet dancer, but she doesn't see the toll it is taking on her life. As competition among her students for Madame's approval becomes crueler and more intense, Delia's weight drastically drops, her schoolwork suffers, and she pulls away from her friends and family. Only when she reaches bottom, can she begin to understand the sadness and loneliness of her sister and her father.

Booktalk

Delia is starving herself. Madame Elanova has noticed that she is fat. "I see fat ladies vanting to be born." If Delia wants to remain in the cast of the ballet, Adagio Classique, she can only eat celery, carrots, hard-boiled eggs, nonfat yogurt, rice cakes, and diet coke.

Delia wanted to get into the Elanova School of Ballet because they took ballet seriously there. And Delia knew that she would do anything to become a ballet dancer. Long hours of rehearsal, aching muscles, no friends, no social life, starvation, cruel remarks from her teachers and her fellow dancers.

There's no one Delia can turn to for help or advice. Her mother died when she was six, her father has buried his grief in his business, and her older sister, Pearl, has been sent to boarding school because she spent more time casting spells than studying. And Delia is getting thinner, weaker, sadder and lonelier -- 276 pages, 6th grade and up

Discussion questions

  1. Pearl has nicknamed Delia “Little Moon.” How is Delia like the moon?
  2. Pearl and Delia argue about whose world is “more real:” Pearl's witchcraft or Delia's dancing. Whose world is more real?
  3. How do Pearl, Delia, and their father each deal with the death of the girls' mother?
  4. Why does Pearl think no one will miss her at boarding school?
  5. At the bottom of page 117, Delia thinks the anorexics "might collapse from starvation." At the bottom of page 118, she thinks "perhaps they weren't too thin after all." What happened?
  6. Compare the rituals of Madame Elanova's school with those Pearl uses in her witchcraft. How are the different? Similar?
  7. What is Pearl learning when she works with Hades? How is her approach different from Madame Elanova's approach with Delia and her other students?
  8. Compare the teaching styles of Madame Elanova and Meia Noite.
  9. What does Delia learn about dance when she studies the Plains Indians' ghost dance and the Brazilians' Ochumare?
  10. Many of the characters in this novel have an obsession, something that occupies them to the exclusion of everything else. Think about the characters and their obsessions, and how they are similar and different.
  11. What is the dance of sisters?
  12. How did the chapter titles affect your reading of the novel?

If you like this book, try

Snack Ideas: rice cakes, something yummy and fattening -- chocolate, Pao de Queijo (Brazilian cheese rolls)

Created in part with funds granted by the Oregon State Library under the Library Services and Technology Act, administered by the Oregon State Library. Send feedback to Katie O'Dell, Reading Promotions Coordinator