Kate's Turn

By Jeanne Betancourt

Book Overview

Thirteen-year-old Kate leaves her home in Oregon to study with a national ballet company in New York City, but then she decides the life of a ballerina is not for her.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0590431048
• ISBN13: 9780590431040
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Apple
• Length: 133 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.8" x 0.5" x 5.3"
• Age Range: 9 to 12 years
• Grade Range: Grades 4 to 7

Customer Reviews

A lovely, but rather weak, look at professional ballet

Kate's Turn is the story of 13-year-old Kate Conway, from Oregon, who has been accepted at the National Ballet School in New York City to study as a serious dancer. There she meets other aspiring ballerinas; her housemother, Ruth, who used to be a dancer before she had a baby; and the son, Jason, who is now a teenager. Kate watches her friends succeed and fail, one girl return home for a knee transplant, and ultimately decides that she would rather live a "normal" teenage life and not continue with her dance scholarship.I've enjoyed this book for nine years, but now that I'm older the plot failings are more obvious. While it made sense to *me* that Kate might not want to be immersed in a worse of fierce competition and eating disorders for the rest of her life, it seemed that she made that choice too quickly. I can stand on the outside of the dance world and say this, but I haven't been dancing seriously for seven years, the way Kate has. It seemed that she was able to leave the dance world too easily.Kate's Turn has a lot of virtues, though: the characters are fun and believable, especially Olga, the dancer from Russia, and Kate's unlikely friendship with Jason also provides some laughs, as well as insight. Jason's relationship with his mother is also interesting and believable in that tragic way of unwanted children; at the end, when Kate is flipping through a book of old pictures of famous ballerinas, she sees a picture of Ruth and realizes that Ruth really was a great ballerina before she had Jason. The book is also a hard objective look at some rather gritty subjects - specifically eating disorders - in a way that children can relate to.It's nice to see Kate making the decision to do something different with her life, but since we don't really know what at the end of the book, it's hard to judge whether the decision has actually been worth it. The book ends with some beautiful writing, but no real sense of closure. One has the idea that maybe Betancourt left it open for a sequel, then didn't want to spoil the simple beauty of the story she had told.

Kate's dream is to dance...

I first read Kate's Turn over 6 years ago, (I'm now 16), and I've read it many times since. It is realistic, all her characters certainly could be real. It is all about ballet dancing and living in New York (though less on the latter). It's a classic, it is easy to read and very fulfilling. Any aspiring ballerina should read it!

A Creative Yarn

Although realistic fiction, Jeanne Betancourt, whose books I have read many of, makes Kate in her struggle to become a true dancer almost real. I could feel her sorrow, thoughts, happiness, and anger. Each page makes you want you read more. This was the first Jeanne Betancourt book I read, and I wanted to read more and more from this talented author. This book is marvelous! Read it!

A wonderful book on an inspiring dancer.

Kate has been choosen to go to New York to dance. Her roomies are very diferent people when leave different lives than her. Will Kate decided to stay in New York or go back home? Please read and find out for yourself

Kate`s Turn By:Jeanne Betancourt

I reccomend this book because I find it to be one of my favorites.It`s about a 13-year old,Kate Conway,who dreams of being a beautiful ballerina.She gets a scholarship to a ballet company and excepts it.She flies all the way across the country from Eugene,Oregon to New York City.While in New York she finds that it`s not as glamourous a life being a ballerina as she had thought it would be.She works every night by being in the Nutcracker Suite. She gets recruited up to level two at the school but is that really what she wants?She`s spent her whole life on ballet and now she has a choice to stick with it and be in ballet for the rest of her life or go home and live the life of a regulular teenager.She`s faced with a very hard decision. I found this book to be great because t has strong feelings,great content and is just plain great!