Roller Skates

Redo due to corrections

Summary

Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer takes place in the 1890’s in New York City. Lucinda is a ten year old girl who loves to experience life by living it. Lucinda’s very favorite thing to do is to roller skate all over the city she adores. In the year this takes place she meets many different people and shares her zest for life. Lucinda is definitely a tomboy and this is very different for this time period. Girls are expected to act like ladies and be proper, but Lucinda will have none of that. As her year progresses she learns about Shakespeare, poverty, bullying, and how to stand up for herself. She experiences many different cultures and grows by seeing that there are all kinds of people and challenges to life. Even as a tomboy Lucinda still has her moments when she could act like a lady. In the end, the other characters who share Lucinda’s love of life accept her the way she is and would not change a thing about her.

Impression

I liked the book once I got into the story. Initially it took a while to get into the story because it was hard to get involved in the characters at first. This book has a higher level vocabulary which might make difficult reading for some children. The story is based in a much earlier time period than the present and might not appeal to some readers. However, I feel that many children will like it because of Lucinda’s free spiritedness and how she handles the problems she faces.

Review from a customer on Amazon.com

By	Lalalalaura

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.

From School Library Journal form Amazon.com

Grades 4-7--1937 Newbery Award-winning book by Ruth Sawyer (Penguin Putnam, pap. 1986) is read by television and stage actress Kate Forbes. The story takes place in New York City in the 1890s, during the year of 10-year-old Lucinda's "orphanage." That's Lucinda's term for her situation when her parents go to Italy and leave her in the care of Miss Peters and Miss Nettie. Lucinda, enjoying her freedom, explores the city on roller skates and makes friends wherever she goes. She reads Shakespeare with her uncle, puts on her own production of The Tempest, creates a magical Christmas for a little girl from an impoverished family, helps a family protect their fruit stand from attacks by rowdy boys, and has picnics in a vacant lot, among other adventures. Forbes does a good job with the reading, conveying Lucinda's enthusiasm but not becoming overly dramatic. However, the story suffers from age. Certain expressions and references are likely to elude most children (and even many adults). The obligatory tragedies (the death of Trinket, the unexplained murder of a woman Lucinda befriends) seem a little maudlin. There is also some ethnic stereotyping, typical of the time that is unacceptable today. However, in libraries where Newbery books are always in demand, this audio-book will help make an older book a little more accessible to young readers.
Sarah Flowers, Santa Clara County Library, Morgan Hill, CA
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Lesson

I don’t see myself using this book in a library setting unless I were using it with excerpts for research about the time period of New York , types of dress or types of travel. Even though this book is a Newbery recipient, I don’t think it would be of much interest to a wide spectrum of children today.