Review: Skate School - Ice Princess
Feb. 5th, 2012 09:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllSkate School - Ice Princess: Kay Woodward Usborne 2009
I really liked this book. It’s your (absurd) novice/underdog makes good arc, so beloved in sports movies and movies about showbusiness, or the scholarship girl school story, really. Only it is set ON ICE.
Frankie is a natural skating talent. Her family could never afford lessons for her, so she’s self-taught. Discovered at her local staking rink, she’s whisked off to a training school in Switzerland, where the school secretary’s Christian name is Rosalie, with a view to getting her good enough to get into Team GB. Teenager Frankie, has eight weeks to prepare for her first real skating competition back in London – a national competition. You just know she’s going to somehow come on enough to win a medal (I guessed the wrong colour).
It helps that Frankie is quite likeable. A quiet girl, who utterly adores skating, as she’d put it, she responds well to the challenges thrown her way (because she is a champion in the making). One of them is Queen Bee Scarlett Jones, who responds to a threat to her throne with bitchy remarks that have already destroyed another girl’s confidence. Frankie has to fight to make said girl, Alesha, her friend – friendship isn’t exactly encouraged at a school when the students are training to be competitors.
There’s a mystery surrounding the strict Director. Boys are also in attendance at this school - Frankie notices one of them, but she’s mainly all about the skating (this book is ‘Endorsed by the National Ice Skating Association, UK’). The descriptions of jumps and spins were very authoritative, or perhaps I should say seemed authoritative, for what would I know? What little time I have spent in an ice rink involved more of my bottom being in contact with the ice than my blades.
Woodward has a gift for amusing but effective descriptions. Having read a lot of other first books in modern day series in this vein recently, I know that getting the tone right is quite hard. Woodward is maybe not aiming for as sophisticated a group (Meg Cabot’s YA books usually cater for a group that likes to think it’s more sophisticated, but is similar age-wise) and that maybe allows her to skirt a few of the tonal issues I found with the St Jude series opener.
This is a well-skated ice rink, as it were (I remember reading stories about American girls in similar stories in the nineties). It’s quite similar to ballet stories too, but that’s because the natural talent discovered, developed and given a chance to shine formula works and has done since fairy stories were first told. The characters are likeable and interesting, and I’d like to find out more about the progress of the wannabe ‘ice princess’ Frankie, whose charm is that she’s a normal girl with an extraordinary talent.
I did see bits of the men's final in the Australian Open, but as it's over a week ago now, it feels a bit redundant to comment upon it.
I really liked this book. It’s your (absurd) novice/underdog makes good arc, so beloved in sports movies and movies about showbusiness, or the scholarship girl school story, really. Only it is set ON ICE.
Frankie is a natural skating talent. Her family could never afford lessons for her, so she’s self-taught. Discovered at her local staking rink, she’s whisked off to a training school in Switzerland, where the school secretary’s Christian name is Rosalie, with a view to getting her good enough to get into Team GB. Teenager Frankie, has eight weeks to prepare for her first real skating competition back in London – a national competition. You just know she’s going to somehow come on enough to win a medal (I guessed the wrong colour).
It helps that Frankie is quite likeable. A quiet girl, who utterly adores skating, as she’d put it, she responds well to the challenges thrown her way (because she is a champion in the making). One of them is Queen Bee Scarlett Jones, who responds to a threat to her throne with bitchy remarks that have already destroyed another girl’s confidence. Frankie has to fight to make said girl, Alesha, her friend – friendship isn’t exactly encouraged at a school when the students are training to be competitors.
There’s a mystery surrounding the strict Director. Boys are also in attendance at this school - Frankie notices one of them, but she’s mainly all about the skating (this book is ‘Endorsed by the National Ice Skating Association, UK’). The descriptions of jumps and spins were very authoritative, or perhaps I should say seemed authoritative, for what would I know? What little time I have spent in an ice rink involved more of my bottom being in contact with the ice than my blades.
Woodward has a gift for amusing but effective descriptions. Having read a lot of other first books in modern day series in this vein recently, I know that getting the tone right is quite hard. Woodward is maybe not aiming for as sophisticated a group (Meg Cabot’s YA books usually cater for a group that likes to think it’s more sophisticated, but is similar age-wise) and that maybe allows her to skirt a few of the tonal issues I found with the St Jude series opener.
This is a well-skated ice rink, as it were (I remember reading stories about American girls in similar stories in the nineties). It’s quite similar to ballet stories too, but that’s because the natural talent discovered, developed and given a chance to shine formula works and has done since fairy stories were first told. The characters are likeable and interesting, and I’d like to find out more about the progress of the wannabe ‘ice princess’ Frankie, whose charm is that she’s a normal girl with an extraordinary talent.
I did see bits of the men's final in the Australian Open, but as it's over a week ago now, it feels a bit redundant to comment upon it.
