Review: Karen's Roller Skates by Ann M Martin & Katy Farina

The second novel in Ann M Martin's best selling Baby-Sitter's Little Sister series gets the graphic novel treatment, and the results are spectacular. Katy Farina does a brilliant job of adapting and updating the subject matter, bringing it to life for contemporary readers.

Karen has become something of a daredevil on her roller skates. She knows she's good, but she wants to continue trying more tricks. And wow, she's just managed to jump over two coffee cans, her coolest trick yet. But then, just as she finishes her trick, she loses her balance and breaks her wrist. But the worst is yet to come. While at the hospital, she discovers that Ricky, her biggest enemy from school, has broken his leg. And he's got a famous baseball player to sign his cast. How will Karen ever be able to compete with him at school on Monday?

This was a cute story, suitable for kids who are at that in between stage of reading, where they're ready for something a bit longer than a picture book, but might not be ready to go it alone with a novel yet. As always, Karen balances on a fine line between being a cute and endearing kid, and an annoying show off who never really learns her lesson. I was also interested to see the first Graphix appearance of Shannon Kilbourne who, like a number of characters has been updated to more accurately reflect contemporary America instead of looking like a stereotypical rich kid. I'm keen to see if this will carry over to the BSC Graphix series, however I may be in for a long wait for that one as it appears that Kristy and the Snobs (the only early book to feature Shannon,) is not being adapted just yet, if at all. (The series will skip straight from Logan Likes Mary Anne! to Claudia and the New Girl.) 

On the whole, this was a fun read with some very cute illustrations and just enough nostalgia to keep old fans interested.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Charlie Brown, Lucy Van Pelt and the Football

Image
One of the longest, and arguably, most infuriating, running gags in Charles Schulz's otherwise brilliant Peanuts comic strip, is where Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown and then pulls it away at the last minute, causing Charlie Brown to fall flat on his back. A typical strip looks like this: Source: Go Comics The gag is one of the darker themes in the strip. It works on the concept that every year, Lucy promises to hold a football for Charlie Brown. Every year, Charlie Brown is initially filled with doubt but is eventually pushed on by a kind of optimism that perhaps, this time, Lucy might just let him kick it after all. As a metaphor for life, it is pretty simple. It talks of the moments when we choose to put our trust in people who have let us down only to be taken by surprise when they let us down, again. Lucy is, arguably, one of the crueller characters in the comic. Described as crabby by the other characters, she is often selfish, takes delight in wilfully hu
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more