REVIEW: Skate School - Stars on Ice
Sep. 11th, 2019 06:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllSkate School: Stars on Ice: Kay Woodward. Usborne, 2010.
There are fewer pages without italics on them than there are pages with. This is the wrong ratio. It’s not just the dialogue of teen ice skater Frankie and friends, it’s the prose around it describing her thought process. Frankie attends ‘Skate School’ AKA the Ice Palace AKA the boarding school for potential GB competitive figure skaters (in Switzerland, although it could be anywhere with a giant ice skating rink). This school year, she and the other students are trying to be good enough for the world championships, where, if they gain a certain score and get medals, they will automatically represent GB in the Winter Olympics. (If that last sentence was in the book, ‘Winter Olympics’ would be italicised and it would end with an exclamation mark.)
This is serious business. Frankie is informed by the (overinvested) coaching director, Madam Von Berne, that she needs to focus on her singles skating. This means no more skating with gorgeous Dylan or having any ‘romantic attachment’ with gorgeous Dylan. Oh, and the British Olympic Association have okayed a camera crew filming the school for a reality TV programme in the hope of boosting the popularity of the sport.
I have held back on the fact that skaters exist above school age of 18 and that the UK haven’t won many medals in my lifetime, but THIS…it’s too much. As if the parents wouldn’t have to sign off on making a ‘reality TV’ show about their underage children! Furthermore, the show seemed to be more of a documentary than ‘reality TV’. This whole idea may have been influenced by the show ‘Dancing on Ice’.
Frankie hasn’t been at the school a year at the start of the book. She comes from a normal, far from wealthy background, but everyone knows she’s a special skater. Her favourite word seems to be ‘magic’ – the feeling she gets when her metal blades hit the ice – and her favourite exclamation is ‘oooh’. I think she’s meant to be fifteen by now, but she’s obviously also meant to appeal to younger readers. Her most dominant emotion is embarrassment and the quality of her skating tends to rely on her confidence levels.
All this helps to explain how, when she’s forbidden to skate with Dylan in her scant free time – which is not a bad idea, as she was burning the candle at both ends – she can’t work herself up to telling him they have to stop. It would be too embarrassing for her. Throw in a sneaky motion-detector camera and Frankie’s arch-nemesis Scarlett ‘Threatened’ Jones, and Frankie may be going to the worlds, but will the price be her happiness?
Along with this plot by numbers, the descriptions of the skating itself are sometimes too technical and detailed. Apparently, a skater being inspired by ballet is a rare and bold creative move...!?! Girls interested in skating (or boys for that matter) should probably be directed to Noel Streatfield’s books first, and having recently read Lorna Hill’s superior take on being a talented child, I’m not minded to give too many free passes although it’s a good-natured attempt to harness young girls’ dreams of being a special one and give readers a taste of what devoting your life to skating is. A quick look back at what I said about the previous two books in the series suggests diminishing returns are kicking in.
(Lightly edited on 5/4/21.)
There are fewer pages without italics on them than there are pages with. This is the wrong ratio. It’s not just the dialogue of teen ice skater Frankie and friends, it’s the prose around it describing her thought process. Frankie attends ‘Skate School’ AKA the Ice Palace AKA the boarding school for potential GB competitive figure skaters (in Switzerland, although it could be anywhere with a giant ice skating rink). This school year, she and the other students are trying to be good enough for the world championships, where, if they gain a certain score and get medals, they will automatically represent GB in the Winter Olympics. (If that last sentence was in the book, ‘Winter Olympics’ would be italicised and it would end with an exclamation mark.)
This is serious business. Frankie is informed by the (overinvested) coaching director, Madam Von Berne, that she needs to focus on her singles skating. This means no more skating with gorgeous Dylan or having any ‘romantic attachment’ with gorgeous Dylan. Oh, and the British Olympic Association have okayed a camera crew filming the school for a reality TV programme in the hope of boosting the popularity of the sport.
I have held back on the fact that skaters exist above school age of 18 and that the UK haven’t won many medals in my lifetime, but THIS…it’s too much. As if the parents wouldn’t have to sign off on making a ‘reality TV’ show about their underage children! Furthermore, the show seemed to be more of a documentary than ‘reality TV’. This whole idea may have been influenced by the show ‘Dancing on Ice’.
Frankie hasn’t been at the school a year at the start of the book. She comes from a normal, far from wealthy background, but everyone knows she’s a special skater. Her favourite word seems to be ‘magic’ – the feeling she gets when her metal blades hit the ice – and her favourite exclamation is ‘oooh’. I think she’s meant to be fifteen by now, but she’s obviously also meant to appeal to younger readers. Her most dominant emotion is embarrassment and the quality of her skating tends to rely on her confidence levels.
All this helps to explain how, when she’s forbidden to skate with Dylan in her scant free time – which is not a bad idea, as she was burning the candle at both ends – she can’t work herself up to telling him they have to stop. It would be too embarrassing for her. Throw in a sneaky motion-detector camera and Frankie’s arch-nemesis Scarlett ‘Threatened’ Jones, and Frankie may be going to the worlds, but will the price be her happiness?
Along with this plot by numbers, the descriptions of the skating itself are sometimes too technical and detailed. Apparently, a skater being inspired by ballet is a rare and bold creative move...!?! Girls interested in skating (or boys for that matter) should probably be directed to Noel Streatfield’s books first, and having recently read Lorna Hill’s superior take on being a talented child, I’m not minded to give too many free passes although it’s a good-natured attempt to harness young girls’ dreams of being a special one and give readers a taste of what devoting your life to skating is. A quick look back at what I said about the previous two books in the series suggests diminishing returns are kicking in.
(Lightly edited on 5/4/21.)
