You can be as fun and imaginative and creative as you want and your audience is going to believe it because they still have that huge imagination. There is a certain limitlessness to children’s novels. “Part of the fun of writing this novel has been finding the balance between keeping the magic of the original while giving it a modern, updated feel,” said Fletcher. So it has a contemporary setting, but it’s a slightly alternative, slightly magical London.”įletcher’s novel is being published to mark both the 125th anniversary of Streatfeild’s birth and the 80th anniversary of Puffin. “The novel will be very ‘Ballet Shoes-y’, but she also wanted it to do something fresh.

She described Ballet Shoes as “really a fairy story with its feet halfway on the ground”, and it quickly became a bestseller, with long queues to meet her when she visited exhibitions held by publisher Puffin.Ĭarmen McCullough, Fletcher’s editor, said the estate had wanted to ensure that any adaptation of the novel was sensitive to the original story.

The author had previously worked in a wartime munitions factory, before becoming an actor herself for 10 years, and writing for adults. The children in Streatfeild’s novel swear: “We three Fossils vow to try and put our names in history books because it’s our very own and nobody can say it’s because of our grandfathers.” Published in 1936, it was Streatfeild’s first book for children. There’s so much more to family than what you’re born into.” “There is a real simplicity to warmth and its magic … It really resonated with me, the idea that you don’t have to be related to someone by blood in order to consider them your family. “The thing that gets me right in the feels, right in the centre of my heart, is the fact it is endorsed by Noel Streatfeild’s estate,” Fletcher said.

The yet-to-be-titled Ballet Shoes novel, which will be published in September, is her first book for children. She is also a vlogger with more than a million subscribers. Photograph: BBC/ITV Productionsįletcher, who is currently starring as Fantine in a new production of Les Misérables, is the author of three novels for adults as well as a bestselling memoir. Fossil-fuelled … the 2007 TV adaptation of Ballet Shoes.

Ballet shoes noel streatfeild summary