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Title: Roller Skates (Puffin Newbery Library) by Ruth Sawyer, Valenti Angelo, William Paene Du Bois ISBN: 0-14-030358-8 Publisher: Puffin Pub. Date: May, 1986 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.75 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: a book to treasure
Comment: I don't remember the first time I read this book or, rather, had it read to me. But I'm 24 now and I probably re-read it every 18 months or so. It's just that good.
Lucinda is one of the best characters in children's literature. She's not a beautiful girl (though you can tell she'll grow into a striking and riveting woman), but she's got an entirely generous spirit and energy saved up from a lifetime of restraint. She manages to have both entirely unique and exciting experiences that few people would (or should) ever share and to make everyday things into adventures. What's more, through the book she truly grows and changes, not any more than a girl of 10 years old should, but just enough.
Her adventures bring to life 1890s New York, both familiar as the city we know now and completely different in scale. One amazing thing, if you think about it, is that this book is set just about 15 or 20 years after the first of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, so perhaps Laura was a young married woman during Lucinda's orphan year. And yet think of the difference in the lives they lived! You wouldn't think it was the same country, even.
It's true that there are some difficult parts in this book. Lucinda does lose friends, one of them violently. But, speaking as someone with a clear memory of being read this book as a child, it's handled so as not to be traumatizing. Lucinda doesn't fully understand or absorb her friend's murder; neither did I, because it's so sensitively written that as a child you realize only that something awful has happened that you _shouldn't_ quite understand. If you tend to underestimate your children, if you want to "protect" them from being thinking people able to live fully in the world, you may want to protect them from this book. My parents thought more of me, and I'm glad of it. Lucinda has been a great friend to me.
Rating: 4
Summary: A veritable roller derby (circa 1890-something)
Comment: An oddly subversive little piece of work for its original 1936 publication date. The story centers on a little girl in 189? named Lucinda. With her cropped black hair, sailor hat, and roller skates she is a perfect little tomboy. From the minute her parents leave her in capable hands in September to their eventual return in June, Lucinda finds herself free of the rules that will eventually twist her from a free spirit into a "lady". In this blissful state of freedom, Lucinda makes friends with the working class, the poor, and those of other ethnicities. She is the first to find the body of a murdered friend, she pulls practical jokes, and she challenges all notions of propriety.
The book is well-written, and must've been a little shocking for its time. It's not every Newbery winner in which the 10-year-old protagonist condemns her prissy aunt to hell (unintentionally, mind you) on one page and sings a bawdy sailor song on the next. Especially impressive is the range of people Lucinda befriends. From the Irish to the Italians to a Chinese woman married to a white man. However, author Ruth Sawyer is as much a victim of her times as anyone else. Lucinda knows plenty of black servants, but she doesn't seem to see any need to befriend them. The Chinese woman she shares the company of is referred to as a "heathen" and is eventually stabbed in the back. This act makes Lucinda a little sad but not overly so. In fact, Lucinda doesn't really feel sadness particularly well, unless it is transformed into anger. When a small child who lives above her dies, she takes the news without so much as a tear.
Children reading this book may have some difficulty keeping the names of the wide range of people presented in it straight. Certainly I had to continually flip back a couple pages every so often to remember exactly who such n' such a person was. The people in this book get about a sentence of description and then are launched into the story head first (something that kids will probably have problems keeping up with). But otherwise, this is a pretty rollicking book. Lucinda hardly sits down for even a second, and the story runs over hill and dale just to keep up with her. Plus, it has the added bonus of displaying a female character pulling a very funny practical joke on her school. A rarity in any day or age.
In the end, Lucinda is forced by her Italian street vendor friend to acknowledge that once her parents return she will never be able to mingle with people from all walks of life. It is a sad moment for her, and it's a pity that Sawyer attributes classism with maturity. Or maybe I'm not giving the author enough credit. Maybe Sawyer is saying that in the late nineteenth-century there were elements of society that made this sad fact true. I don't know the answer. In any case, "Roller Skates" is a surprisingly good book with a spunky gal who won't easily slip from the reader's mind. Multiple interpretations of it can exist, and for that reason it is clearly a classic.
Rating: 1
Summary: THIS IS THE MOST BORING BOOK I'VE EVER READ IN MY LIFE!
Comment: This is the most boring book in the entire world! It wasn't very upbeat in my opinion, and nothing really happened! I would never reccomend this book to anyone...
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Title: Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright ISBN: 0440486815 Publisher: Yearling Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1987 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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Title: The White Stag by Kate Seredy ISBN: 0140312587 Publisher: Puffin Pub. Date: October, 1979 List Price(USD): $4.99 |
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Title: Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski ISBN: 0064405850 Publisher: HarperTrophy Pub. Date: 30 June, 1995 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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Title: Miracles on Maple Hill by Joe & Beth Krush, Virginia Sorensen Waugh ISBN: 0152047182 Publisher: Odyssey Classics Pub. Date: 01 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Miss Hickory by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Ruth Gannett ISBN: 014030956X Publisher: Puffin Pub. Date: May, 1977 List Price(USD): $5.99 |
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