Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild

In my mind Ballet Shoes was a very different story – maybe I'm half remembering another book?  But this book published in about 1936 is a good story.

I just checked out Wiki and found that the author was a woman using part of her name that sounded like a man.  That explains the excellent drawing of the female characters (not that a male author can't achieve this as well).

The classic story concerns the life and times of 3 adopted girls, Pauline, Petrova and Posy.  They adopted the surname Fossil because the old man who rescued them also collected Fossils.  He was nicknamed GUM for Great Uncle Matthew.

This book is squarely aimed at girls.  The heroines are very different from each other and somewhat flawed but they stick together.