If just because I loved watching Mikhail Baryshnikov dance when I was a kid, and because I love Vladimir Radunsky’s whimsical illustrations. From the sound of the text, Baryshnikov was more of an advisor than a writer, and Radunksy wrote much of it. So it makes me wonder if it’s not so much a celebrity picturebook as a picturebook by a picturebook artist that crosses arts disciplines to dance… does that make sense?

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6434786.html?nid=2788

But I have to wait until May to decide if it lives up to the possibilities I’m seeing in my head. That cover, though, interests me. And the idea of how arts education is so spotty sometimes that a child can grow up through all of school and never be exposed to any sort of arts–music, dancing, painting and drawing. I feel fortunate to have had all of the above growing up, and I know how well those arts gave me skills I transferred to academic performance (and all the studies about that sort of thing make me amazed
that the arts are cut from the curriculum in so many places…).

Then again, there’s also the idea that so many picturebooks are about dancing, so how is this one different? We’ll see.

(I say this as a reader, not an editor, because I don’t do picturebooks professionally.)