Skating Shoes (The Shoe Books #7) by Noel Streatfeild

★★★★½

*** Warning!! This review contains spoilers!! ***

This book is probably one of the most aptly named "shoe books" because skating shoes actually do play a role in the story.

Like many other "shoe books", this book features an orphan, Lalla. Readers may recognize the unlikable aunt / kind, helpful uncle paradigm from Dancing Shoes. Also, similar to the way adoptees were sometimes described as not "real" family members in Dancing Shoes, in Skating Shoes, the life of an only child is depicted rather sadly, making it perhaps not the best reading choice for insecure only children.

Though Lalla is certainly a primary character in the book, the true main character is Harriet, who has a wonderfully large family. For the first time in a "shoe book", we see some really positive family dynamics at work. Though George, the father, may have been rather inept, Olivia, the mother, was loving and sensible. Throw in two industrious older brothers (I enjoyed the side story about Alec and his paper route) and a comic relief younger brother, and you get just the kind of family Lalla longs for. Harriet has no nurse or governess, but of course Lalla does, and Harriet gets to share hers.

As with other "shoe books", this story featured a child with talent, and that talent was explored alongside other important character traits such as ambition and the ability to work hard. In some ways, Lalla reminded me of Susan in Tennis Shoes. Both girls had enough talent to stand out among observers, but both fell just short of being really great. Susan needed to work really, really hard to succeed, and even so, she didn't have the confidence of a champion and was too self-conscious in front of an audience. Lalla thrived in front of an audience, and she could work hard when she wanted to, but she lacked the passion for the "figures" part of figure skating. Besides coming to terms with their own shortcomings, both girls had the additional challenge of seeing a close loved one rise to potential greatness instead of them. I'm not sure how realistic it was, but I liked how neither Susan nor Lalla were jealous, but rather, each was happy to see her friend succeed, and was comfortable with her own lot in life.

It was interesting, too, how Tennis Shoes and Skating Shoes presented two opposing views of grooming children to be champions. In Tennis Shoes, Susan looked forward to winning lots of championship cups, but in Skating Shoes, the existence of so many cups was portrayed as vulgar. And while everyone seemed to support the idea of training children to be tennis stars, the majority of onlookers in Skating Shoes seemed to think it was downright silly to train a child to be a skating star.

Lalla may have been "a bit of a madam" sometimes, but rest assured, the author's favorite lesson - "pride comes before a fall" - was close at hand.

I was mostly pleased with the ending, but as usual, I still wished for more. It would have been nice if the book hadn't ended until we saw how Aunt Claudia reacted to Lalla not being a champion. Probably she would have been fine, after she realized that Lalla would still be a star, just a different kind of skater, and though that was implied, it would have been nice to have seen it through.