ANGELINA BALLERINA'S NEW BALLET TEACHER

Angelina Ballerina gets a new dance instructor and learns to accept that there’s more than one “right” way to do things.

Angelina was comfortable with her former ballet teacher, but when she meets her new instructor she’s urged to jazz up pirouettes and float through the air like a butterfly. She tries to comply, but deep down she’s feeling insecure and yearns for the comfort of proper ballet moves. Each page offers interactive elements (hinted at by glistening stars), and there’s a glossary embedded in the text that offers definitions and demonstrations of numerous ballet terms. Various bells and whistles are available by visiting the main menu, including puzzles, coloring-book pages and video snippets. However, there are a few hiccups. If a character is touched out of sequential order, the dialogue and/or animated movement might cause some confusion. And when the app is in narration mode, the story is immediately interrupted if one of the characters is tapped (potentially making it hard to get through the story with over-eager toddlers.) Over the course of several readings, there were a couple of screen freezes and one outright crash; still, the app’s overall functionality and the popularity of perhaps the most graceful and polite rodent on the planet make this app a good bet.