Roller Skates
by Ruth Sawyer
Summary
Ten year old Lucinda Wyman spends a year of unusual freedom in 1890s New York City while her parents travel in Italy, left in the care of two unmarried sisters who give her far more room to roam than a girl her age and class would normally have, and Lucinda spends that freedom almost entirely on roller skates, covering ground across the city that would otherwise be closed to her. Sawyer builds the novel from the people Lucinda meets and befriends along the way, a cab driver, a police officer, the son of an Italian fruit vendor, an actress who draws her toward an early love of theater, and an uncle who reads Shakespeare with her, each relationship treated as seriously as an adult friendship rather than as background color for a child's story. The freedom is not without cost: Lucinda witnesses real loss during the year, including a child's death, handled directly rather than softened for its young audience, and by winter, confined indoors more than she is used to, she grows genuinely difficult before finding her footing again. Her parents' return at the year's end brings the arrangement to a close and signals, gently, that this particular chapter of independence cannot simply continue, though Lucinda carries what she learned from it forward regardless.
Sawyer draws the whole novel from her own childhood, a period when her own family's travels left her similarly free in the care of relatives and an Irish nanny, and she later said in her Newbery acceptance speech that a free child is a happy child, a line that reads as the book's own thesis stated outright. The novel reads warmly and moves briskly between episodes, notable for its era in how directly it handles death and a child's real independence rather than keeping either at a safe, sanitized distance.
Historical Context & Significance
The Viking Press published Roller Skates in October 1936, illustrated by Valenti Angelo, and it won the 1937 Newbery Medal. No committee citation survives from this era, but that year's runners up were Lois Lenski's Phebe Fairchild, Her Book, Idwal Jones's Whistler's Van, Ludwig Bemelmans's The Golden Basket, Margery Williams's Winterbound, Agnes Hewes's The Codfish Musket, and Constance Rourke's Audubon.
Kirkus Reviews gave the book a starred review at the time, reserved for what it judged books of remarkable merit, and a later entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography noted that its frank handling of death and its loosely supervised child heroine were genuinely unusual choices for children's fiction of the period rather than typical of it. The novel remains available and is often read now alongside Sawyer's own account of the childhood it drew from.