Writer: Siena Cherson Siegel
Artist: Mark Siegel
Company: Aladdin Paperbacks

As a comic book reviewer, I’m not exactly the paragon of machismo anyway, but I’m going to confess something in this review that’ll kill even the little bit of respect I might have had: I studied dance in college. Minored in it, actually. Now, true, partly it was because the department was 90% cute college girls, but also, I had an interest in dance, and that only grew as I studied it. So maybe it’s just that I’m the audience for this memoir of a young girl training for ballet that made me love it so much. But I think it’s more likely that the reason I liked it so much is because it’s just that damned good.

To Dance is a comic book memoir of Siena Cherson Siegel, who tells a story of living in Puerto Rico, Boston and New York and falling in love with ballet throughout her young life. This is not just the tale of a girl who took a few dance classes at the Y, however. No, Siena studied with the New York City Ballet and performed at Lincoln Center, alongside legends like Mikhail Baryshnikov. Still, Siegel’s tale is accessible even to those who don’t even know Baryshnikov’s name, as her love for ballet, both the learning of it and the performances she takes part in and witnesses, is infectious. Much as I enjoyed taking dance, I rarely go out and view performances, but Siegel’s graphic novel instills in me a desire to attend a performance, so passionate and moving is her expression of it.

Siegel is joined in this endeavor on art by her husband, Mark Siegel, who I had previously known as the editorial director with a really good eye on First Second Books. Mark Siegel is not just a good judge of talent, however, but a talent in his own right, and his watercolor looking art here is perfect for Siena Siegel’s tale. He perfectly expresses the feel of these palaces of dance in New York or the isolating and yet comforting feel of being one of only a few people in a large room meant for teaching dance, and he captures the grace and movement of ballet perfectly. There’s one particular sequence, in which Siena is waxing poetic about the ballet in a pro football game she’s watching, and Mark Siegel nails the visual just perfectly, so we can see exactly what she’s talking about. The Siegels’ close relationship has clearly benefited them here, presenting a kind of creative synergy rarely seen.

To Dance has a laser focus on Siena’s story of dance, dipping only very occasionally into the rest of her life. I found myself wishing for a little more exploration of hints like “I didn’t see Daddy very much anymore. He was back in San Juan a lot. At the time, I thought it was for his work.” True, the rest of the story pretty clearly spells out what she means, and it is, in fairness, peripheral to the story that Siena Siegel is telling, but I felt like she was keeping the readers just slightly at arm’s length at times in this story. Given that the context of her family is mostly irrelevant to the story as it’s told, I think that she would have been better off eliminating the family subplots altogether and focusing only on what related directly to her evolution as a dancer, but the subplots are never distracting, only more intriguing than the follow-up they sometimes receive.

Siena Siegel’s graphic novel memoir is lyrical, moving and completely engaging. If you’re a fan of dance, or if you want to see what can happen when a dream takes hold of a young girl so fully, and with such positive, educational and rewarding results, you owe it to yourself to pick it up. I know I’ll be putting this into my daughter’s hands as soon as she’s old enough to read it.