This short chapter book (I read it in one sitting) is about thirteen-year-old KC, who’s tried many sports but always lost interest or quit when it got difficult. She used to roller-skate, and now suddenly wants to try rollerblading when she sees a speed skating race in an online video. Her friends and parents express doubt and caution because she’s never used inline skates before, and the local tournament she wants to participate in is just a month away. But she finds an older kid to coach her (a friend’s cousin) and devises a way to scrape together enough money to purchase good inline skates. She practices outside at a park, does some strength training, does a short job stint delivering fast food to tables on wheels, and then gets to practice racing on a real track (with high school kids) shortly before the tournament. I liked that the story showed the real struggles of learning a new skill- KC can’t even stay upright on her skates at first, has to do off-skates exercises first, then going back to using quad skates initially. I also liked that she didn’t automatically win at the tournament- in fact she caused a crash in her first race that was embarrassing, all the other competitors had to re-do the race with her. In the second race she placed high enough to be able to continue in the tournament, and she was thrilled at her accomplishment. That much was realistic, and it was nice to see a story that showed a kid overcoming something they’d always had difficulty with (sticking with it when things got hard).
But there was so much else about this story that felt unrealistic to me. I had a hard time believing that someone could get good enough at inline skating to compete in a real tournament in under a month. Maybe kids pick up new skills that quickly? There was no explanation about how or where she got access to practice on a real speed-skating track (wouldn’t I love to just skate for exercise somewhere like that!) The dialog in this book was unbelievable. All the supportive and encouraging things her friends said to KC, sounded so rehearsed. Like the exact perfect thing you would expect someone to say in that situation, if they were an adult. I don’t think kids talk like that with each other. At least, the kids I know don’t. It just made the whole narrative feel stiff and fake. Almost made me quit reading, but I was curious about how the story would end (I had a bad feeling she’d win first place immediately, glad it turned out more realistic than that).
I described this book to a friend of mine who is a school librarian. She asked me if it was promoted as part of a hi-lo series. I didn’t know that was a genre! Hi-lo books are written with material appropriate for and of interest to older kids, but with simpler sentence structure, easy vocabulary and short chapters. They’re for struggling readers. I didn’t see anything on this book’s publication page to make me think it was a hi-lo book, but when I looked up the publisher that answered my question: yes. It is. Nice that it is about sports, a subject that will interest a lot of kids (this series has more than twenty books, all about different sports), and has a good message (persistence and practice pay off). There’s a short glossary in the back of some more advanced words, and some pages with facts about inline speed skating. That part was interesting. I just couldn’t appreciate some of the writing style.
It was also strange to me that all the books in this series have Jake Maddox listed as the author, but on the title page of this one it says text by Shawn Pryor. So I suppose it was ghostwritten. I wonder if the other books in the series are, too. Probably.
Borrowed from the public library.
