Another Way to Dance

As in Erika Tamar's Alphabet City Ballet (reviewed above), the heroine of this impressive first novel is a minority student at a prestigious ballet school. Unlike Tamar's starry-eyed younger heroine, however, 14-year-old Vicki has experienced subtle racism in classes where ""visual harmony"" is as highly regarded as a perfect pirouette, and she has tried her best to fit in. Vicki's recently divorced parents have both worked hard to instill in her an appreciation of her African American heritage, but Vicki is more interested in ballet: ""Everything that's important to me doesn't have much to do with the color of my skin."" She is thrilled to attend a summer session of the School of American Ballet in New York, to work at her art as well as to nurse her elaborate, ""color-blind"" daydreams about Mikhail Baryshnikov. The friends she makes while at the school, especially a teenage boy from Harlem, help pull Vicki out of her narrow fantasies. She begins to face her daily frustrations in and out of Lincoln Center, and to realize that she cannot ignore the issue of race any more than her unhappiness with her parents' divorce. Southgate offers a poignant account of self-discovery, convincingly hopeful and steadfast in its refusal to settle for easy solutions. Ages 12-up. (Nov.)