From Booklist
Dance instructor Miss McKirdy retained her maiden name and raised three daughters: Jilly, Annie, and Barbara. During the 1950s and early 1960s, they won hundreds of Highland dance competitions in South Africa and Scotland. But Miss McKirdy was an overbearing perfectionist who drove her daughters into unwise relationships, other countries, and mental illness. Jilly married badly and reared a brood of troubled children, and Annie, whose onstage charm and talent warmed audiences (she was dubbed "South Africa's Shirley Temple" ), struggled through decades of hospitalization and shock treatment. This memoir's author, Miss McKirdy's youngest daughter, won the coveted South African Highland Dancing Championship. She then lucked into acting, and we follow her career in theater, radio, and television. After being named the best actress of the year for 1973, she and her husband emigrated from Johannesburg to England, where she achieved acclaim as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. The diligent reader will learn a bit about Highland dancing and South African culture. Jennifer Henderson
From Kirkus Reviews
The evocative autobiography of an actress born and bred in Johannesburg, whose mother found fulfillment in teaching her daughters--and other daughters of South Africa--the traditional dances of Scotland. As the book begins, ``Miss McKirdy lives with her three daughters . . . in a dutch-gabled house on the outskirts of Johannesburg.'' Miss McKirdy had declined to take her husband's name, but was married to a fellow Scot who had immigrated to South Africa. Daddy was a drunk, and Mummy coped by training her daughters and others' to be champions of Highland dance and by teaching elocution at a Roman Catholic convent school. Author Kinghorn was the youngest of the dancing daughters, preceded by Jilly, nicknamed China because of her china-doll complexion, and Annie, born on a Sabbath ``bonny and bright and good and gay.'' As Barbara tells the tale, she was neither the prettiest nor the most appealing dancer, but like her mother, she was a survivor, winning the South African dance championship, marrying, and moving to England, where for a period she worked with her husband as a couple in service, cleaning bathrooms and furtively picking flowers from the master's garden. Barbara goes on to become a successful actress, but she loses her family, and her country, in one tragedy after another. Annie simply disappears from a mental hospital, although Barbara tries to track her through a series of psychics, and Jilly dies of a cancer for which her Christian Science religion offered no palliative. Daddy dies when the last of his secret supply of drink is gone, and Mummy/Miss McKirdy dies of old age. Replete with compelling detail, this is a story of the magnetism of South Africa, of a troubled but tightly knit family, and of a woman who graduated from self-absorption to self- awareness in the swirling world of the theater. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
