BALLET BOOKS, I confess, make my heart sink.

A million years ago, I, too, yearned to be a ballerina in a sparkly pink tutu, but modern ballet stories seem so anaemic compared to Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes.

When I receive books like Nina, Fairy Ballerina and am told that it’s about Nina Dewdrop, and “perfect for Mini Bedroom Dancers . . . fully aware of their pester- power”, I can see why my own daughter prefers kick boxing. Ballet as an expression of music, ballet as an art requiring the highest discipline, is another matter. Even Ballet Shoes did not go into the agony and the ecstasy of ballet as artistic ideal or ordeal; we were simply told that Posy Fossil has an inborn genius for it.

The film Billy Elliot came much closer, as does Eva Ibbotson’s captivating romantic comedy, A Company of Swans. But only Cassandra Golds’s Clair-de-Lune takes us both into the dream of dance, and the nightmare.

Clair-de-Lune has grown up with her grandmother at the top of a “very tall, very narrow, very old building”.

Her grandmother had been a ballerina, and so had her mother, Lune, who died at the height of her fame, dancing the role of a dying swan.

Since then, Clair-de-Lune has not spoken a word. Her life has been devoted to “The Dance” and training to become a ballerina in turn.

Half-starved, bullied and poor, Clair has a wretched, friendless existence, hated as a snob by other pupils because she can’t speak.

Then, one day, she meets a mouse who can, and whose passionate desire is to start a ballet school for mice.

Bonadventure befriends her and introduces her to the mysterious monk, Brother Inchmahome, who lives in a secret country reached through the basement of her building. Because he has trained himself to listen to the tiniest sounds of nature, the monk can hear Clair express her deepest fears and miseries.

All of this may sound twee and mad, but let me assure you that it is neither. Golds writes with a profound sympathy for lonely, sensitive children that I have come across only in Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse. As in Goudge’s famous novel, this is among other things a highly symbolic story that plays with fairytale images of the moon and the night, but where Goudge and Aiken used a robust humour to offset the magical elements in their tale, Golds is really writing about a child coming close to annihilating despair.

As is becoming recognised, there are all too many children who suffer from acute depression, and far too few genuinely good, imaginative books to help them feel less alone.

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