1937: ROLLER SKATES by Ruth Sawyer with illustrations by Valenti Angelo
Spring has come; windows are open.
1937 medalist Roller Skates is the mostly-episodic story of 10-year-old Lucinda Wyman, who spends a year with a governess in 1890s New York City, while her parents are off on a year-long trip to Italy; the novel is loosely based on author Ruth Sawyer’s own experiences growing up with parents that would often head off to Europe for the summer and leave her with a nanny, and taking advantage of her hands-off supervision to get into mischief and explore the bustling city on her skates. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s a gripping page-turner, but it’s pleasant enough.
Although Lucinda will get into plenty of misadventures with her new friends (the boy whose dad owns the fruit stand, the girl in the garment district, the police officer, the hansom cab driver), she’s also excited to spend plenty of time with her beloved books. Here’s an early (and very beautiful) bit of characterization as Lucinda unpacks her books and stocks her new shelf:
“There were her books, too, to put on their shelf…the books she handled and put in their places with loving care. They filled a large portion of her inner world - a sanctuary built securely to keep out Aunt Emilys and French governesses. She smoothed her copy of Tanglewood Tales, with a gold Pegasus riding over a crimson cover; she patted Water Babies, without pictures and a feckless binding that matched The King of The Golden River and Plutarch’s Lives. There was Hans Andersen, with a frontispiece of Little Ida and her flowers. Every story Andersen had written was in the book; and Lucinda had read them all since her tenth birthday. Next came Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Secretly Lucinda laid her own claim to the adventures, so many times had she followed the White Rabbit down the hole, swum the pool of Alice’s tears, read the labels and drunk from the two bottles, been invited by the Queen of Hearts to play croquet, with a flamingo for a mallet. Beside Alice, on the shelf, went The Peterkin Papers; and next to that her beloved Uncle Remus, Hans Brinker, Jan of the Windmill, Robin Hood, and Swiss Family Robinson.”
I feel like this passage alone probably put Roller Skates ahead in the race for the 1937 Newbery. Every person who loves books knows exactly what Sawyer (and Lucinda) is talking about. I love every single book on my bookshelf, some of which I've owned since grade school. If you take a look, you can pick out the rough thematic clusters I've carved out on my shelf (Kurt Vonnegut, comics, Catholic stuff, Communist stuff1, music theory textbooks, children's novels, etc.). I could even tell you which of the books are my second copy, because I read my first copy too early in life, didn't get it, and then realized its greatness later in life and had to track down another copy. Every year, my bookshelf gets too crammed full and I have to make tough decisions on what has to go to the little free library down the street. To get introduced to a character that shares my love for books like that was very nice, and likely very nice for the young readers, and likely very nice for the librarians on the Newbery committee.
And Lucinda continues to read voraciously throughout Roller Skates, as she gets introduced to her new favorite writer of all time and her uncle asks her “Ever met William Shakespeare, Lucinda?” With that, Lucinda is introduced to the world of The Tempest and Shakespeare’s comedies (and then later to Romeo and Juliet and the tragedies), and never looks back. Soon, she is putting together her own costumes and sets with her friends and staging her own versions of the plays. Eventually, her kindly uncle takes her to see a different musical play in the city, telling her “You’re getting a sort of vaccination this year. If you don’t know it now, you’ll find it out some day. But it’s going to keep you from dying of a terrible disease: Snobbishness - priggishness - the Social Register. I don’t care a damn what you call it, Snoodie, as long as you get your antitoxin before the disease gets you.”
This one sticks with me, particularly when I think about my kids. I want them to love books throughout their lives as much as I did and do. And we have, to be clear, way too many books in our house as it is, for children and for adults, and then we keep bringing more home from the library on top of that, but I want them to have that variety, those options to hear other stories and enter other worlds, that appreciation for all of the incredible thoughts and imaginations out in the world, as that “antitoxin against snobbishness and priggishness”. I keep saying in these essays that great fiction shows people that “the world is bigger than you think, and you’re not alone in it”; I mainly keep saying this because it’s one of my very few good ideas and so I need to just keep hitting it over and over again. But it’s one of the clear themes in Roller Skates and the way they show it through Lucinda’s love of books is one that makes it easy for readers to connect with Lucinda. And Lucinda does go through a lot in Roller Skates: her friends are bullied and some of them die of illness, she meets lonely people and poor people, some of her relationships with her extended family are awkward and strained, and she often finds herself in unfamiliar and intimidating situations. But she never ends up afraid, she brings with her a sense of joy and perspective that comes with learning from her stories that she’ll never be alone in the world. When Lucinda and her uncle finish watching the musical, her uncle notes that “there’s genius for you, in the great art of merry-making. We give too little importance to it. Why there are times I’d exchange a hundred dollars for one good laugh.”
What a great message for a child to read, that there is value in making people happy, that there is value in sharing stories with others, that it is something that can bring us all comfort and make us all feel a little bit less alone. What a wonderful thing for a parent to tell a child, and to model with them every day as they share stories and tell jokes together. What a blessing it is that we have each other and can find stories like these. I’ll talk about the brutal murder in the middle of the story next.
Anyways, there’s a horrifying murder right in the middle of Roller Skates, presented with about as much warning as I’ve just given you, and then dropped quickly for the rest of the story just as I’m about to do in a few more paragraphs. Partway through the novel, Lucina befriends an elegant and affluent adult “Oriental” “princess” who lives in an apartment near one of her closer friends, and agrees to start tutoring her English, which she does gladly until she can’t anymore when she walks into her apartment one day and finds her corpse with a knife buried in her back:
“Walking softly across the small square of hallway she stood looking through the portieres into the parlor. She could see the figure of her princess crushed among the cushions on the divan. Was she asleep?...On the toes of her stubby books Lucinda walked to the divan. She did not want to walk there; she wanted to climb back into her box and have somebody fasten the lid safely down on her. But walk she did, seeing things as she went: the Japanese doll she had named Nanky Pu was on the floor; the princess was lying with her face buried in the cushions; she was wearing the loveliest gown she had even seen her wear, all flowing gold and crimson, and in the back of it stood, straight up, the jeweled hilt of the dagger that should have been hanging on the wall.”
Anyways, she tells her neighbor, who doesn’t notify the police because he doesn’t want Lucinda to have to sit for interrogations, and then she goes about her normal adventures for the rest of the novels. The murder is never solved or even partially explained or really ever mentioned again. Anyways I thought that was pretty jarring, back to talking about Shakespeare!
Lucinda eventually sees a production of The Tempest later in the novel, and carefully notes the audience’s reaction at the end of the play:
“Everybody clapped and clapped; and then they came to look the theater over, to wonder at the scenery, the actors, the properties. Lucinda was too young to guess; but here were men and women who as children had cried out to do this very thing. And all the desire for it, the disappointment at never having done it, brought them crowding, eager, rather wistful, around the children and the theatre that was so small and held so much.”
Lucinda is surrounded by people who never outgrew their love of Shakespeare, of plays, of the written word, of stories. They want the same things that ten-year-old Lucinda wants: to dig deep into the living breathing story on the stage, to learn more about how it was done, to look at it from every angle, to know that the people around them are marvelling at it in the same way that they are. Lucinda is never going outgrow that either (Sawyer certainly never did). I don’t ever want my kids to outgrow it, either.
I didn’t outgrow it myself; I spend a decent chunk of my childhood in a public library, since my mom worked as a librarian and I’d often be hanging out there doing my homework after school, browsing through Goosebumps books and while waiting for my mom’s shift to end. I still drag my oldest daughter to the library basically every week, and not just because I have to keep checking out Newbery winners so I can keep up with my own email newsletter. It’s because I want her to love going there, like I did and like I still do, I want to her to look through the shelves and pick books out herself and fall in love with them and return them and remember them later and check them out again for old times’ sake. I want her to do that now, and I want her to do it when she’s a teen, and I want her to do it when she’s an adult. I want her to find other friends who love the same books that she does, and I want her to talk about those books with them, and connect over them, and grow closer to other people because of them. I want her to see stories acted out on stage and on screen and marvel at how they come to life in different ways and different media. I do not - this is very important - want her to make friends with a mysterious adult who ends up brutally stabbed to death for no reason and without warning and then forget about her forever. But there’s a lot to like about Lucinda, and a lot that we can take away from her love and wonder.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1955 medalist, The Wheel On The School by Meindert DeJong.
The previous two categories are shelved separately from 'Catholic Communist stuff'.