Thanks to Natalie Portman and Black Swan and whatnot, ballet is resurgent and popular! There is plenty of storyline potential in ballet, with dancers driven to succeed, and the mysterious inner workings of dance companies and schools. This list is a sort of companion to the theatre list, and also as a salute to mum, a ballet fiend, and other ballet fiends like her:

1. Bunheads, Sophie Flack – Great cover! Nice title! Hannah is consumed by her ballet - the hours of rehearsals, the performances – until she meets Jacob, a free-spirit musician. Her growing relationship with him helps give her a new perspective on life, and ballet’s place in it.
2. Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfield – this is a classic children’s book, so if you haven’t read it maybe you must? Either that, or you could cheat and watch the DVD with Emma Watson of Hermione fame.
3. Dancing in the Dark, Robyn Bavati – not the song by Bruce Springsteen. In this a girl born into a strict Jewish family is not allowed ballet lessons, so (as often happens with forbidden things) she learns in secret and begins to question the world she lives in.
4. The Splendour Falls, Rosemary Clement-Moore – with a supernatural twist! Sylvie’s broken leg ruins her ballet career, and after her father dies her mother ships her off from New York to Alabama. Everyone knows that mysterious, unexplainable things happen in the deep south.
5. Rose Sees Red, Cecil Castellucci – set in 1982, when the USA was at loggerheads with the USSR. Rose is an American teen who lives to dance, and Yrena is her next door neighbour, a Russian ballet dancer performing in New York and sick of being confined in her apartment. One night, Yrena makes a bold escape, out her bedroom window and into Rose’s, and what follows is a night out on the town, which would be great in New York.
6. Fish Feet, Veronica Bennett – not exactly a title the screams ballet, but nonetheless! Erik loves ballet and football, but when he decides to audition for the Royal Ballet School he faces the prospect of letting down his football team: you can imagine how understanding they are. A book about branching out, taking a risk, and being different.
7. A Company of Swans, Eva Ibbotson - Swan Lake in the Amazon jungle! “Defying her father, Harriet runs away to join the ballet on a journey to the Amazon. In a grand opera house, deep in the heart of the wild jungle, she performs Swan Lake – and falls in love with a mysterious British exile. But Harriet’s father has tracked her down… and her new life is under threat.” (catalogue)
8. The Melting Season, Celeste Conway - ”Giselle, the sheltered daughter of two famous ballet dancers, comes to terms with her relationships with both her late father and her mother, realizing some important truths that help her move forward both in her life and with her own dancing.” (catalogue)
9. The Kings Are Already Here, Garret Freymann-Weir – Phebe takes the summer off from training to be a ballet dancer to stay with her father in Switzerland. There she meets Nikolai, a young chess champion on his own quest to find legendary chess player Stas Vlajnik. Phebe organises a search to find Stas, and together with Nikolai and her father, travels across Europe following her leads.
10. Audition, Louise Kehoe. Sara wins a scholarship to study ballet. Her life as a full-time dancer in training is hard, but enjoyable (including being the muse of Remington, choreographer), but she starts to question her life’s direction when she discovers a love of writing.