This book was coming up due, so I grabbed it off my kid’s stack to suggest it for their bedtime reading. Thumbed through idly while walking to their room and noticed a few pages that featured roller skating. So I had to read it to see what that was about, but came away ultimately disappointed. I think I’m just not the right audience for this, is all.
The main character, Vivian, is tired of feeling ignored and overlooked in school. She wants to stand out and be popular. In a spontaneous, bold move she chops her hair off on the day of school pictures. Kids around her are shocked, her mother is understandably upset and drives her immediately to a haircut place to get it “fixed”. Viv is thrilled to get her cut restyled to match a social media person she follows- who is all about “being your best self” even in new and unfamiliar places. When Viv returns to school, she finds that her brash haircutting has gotten her exactly the attention she wanted- suddenly kids all over are asking her for style advice and she stages quite a few dramatic eye-grabbing moments at school- to get attention and support for a team, to help a kid ask another girl out, to design someone’s costume that makes a statement for a cause. She’s thrilled to be in the spotlight at last. But it comes at the cost of shifting attention away from her friends. Right in the middle of this book, there’s sudden details dropped in about the three of them being involved in roller skating, working on a team routine together, and planning to go to a con that they’re making costumes for, modeled after some hype sci-fi action packed roller-skaters-save-the-day show series? There was so little explanation or backstory on any of that, I wondered if I’d missed a prequel to this book. But that was all I got. Well, Viv is suddenly interested in more things than helping her friends get ready for the con, and then she pressures them into performing their skating routine at the school dance, before they’re actually ready. They mess up and it’s all on film- because of course these kids are on their phones all the time, videoing each other and posting stuff on social media immediately. It was a huge theme for the whole book. Viv and her friends are devastated at that turn of events, but then someone turns it around and makes an example of how it’s okay to try something new, fail and try again. Viv manages to patch things up with her skating friends and attend the con after all. I couldn’t tell though, if she dialed back her frenetic activities grasping for attention all the time.
Borrowed from the public library.
