Stacks Challenge: Roller Skates

I finished Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer. It was okay. It's about Lucinda, an awkward, spirited girl who's seen as an unpleasant, unattractive, difficult child to her family. When her parents take a trip, she spends a year with her aunts and befriends all kinds of people - the kind of people her parents probably wouldn't approve of. In that respect, she's like Pollyanna. She sees beauty and worth in people that high society wouldn't value. The book has moments of brilliance, but in between those moments, I was bored and had a hard time keeping all the names of her various friends straight.

Towards the end, the book suddenly takes a realistic turn and becomes less fun, then finally ends sadly because Lucinda has to go back home and she doesn't want to leave the wonderful life she's discovered. In that respect, the book ends in despair - there isn't any indication that life gets any better for her when she goes back home, just that she's leaving and is going to leave a large part of herself behind in this place where she's discovered her true self. In fact, in the last scene, she's staring at her own reflection in the water insisting that she'll never leave, and one wonders if she jumped in so she could stay there forever, always ten years old. The beginning of the book is circular, with an unknown person confronting Lucinda years later, and she's still a ten-year-old in roller skates, as if her life never got beyond that one year. Really sad.

I've started Linnets and Valerians by Elizabeth Goudge and I'm enjoying that one a lot more.