Rival Gymnast by Sheila Haigh
My rating: 3/5 cats
i was 8 when The Little Gymnast came out. and i was in my thirties when i realized there were two more books in the little gymnast series; Somersaults and Rival Gymnast, published well after the first.
inspired to recapture my lost youth, i decided to read these books, hoping to fall in love once more with anda and her foolish risk-taking, her impatience with the fancy dancey portions of gymnastics training; enduring the ballet, eager to get back to the part when you just fling your body out into the void, her stubborn determination to succeed at gymnastics despite her hippie family’s financial hardships and how heartbreakingly hard it was for them to pay for all the fees and clothing and transportation, and her teeny tiny kitten bella.
so i tracked them down and i read them and i’m still trying to decide if i should have bothered. neither of them are as good as the first one, but then—neither of them were as bad as The Battle for the Castle, which is a sequel i never should have attempted as a grown person.
would i have felt differently if i had read these back when i was age-appropriate? hard to say. when i reread The Little Gymnast last year, i still loved it, but i’m sure nostalgia played a big part in that enjoyment.
do i feel complete? no, but that’s because these books don’t feel complete on their own, nor do they voltron-lock to form a cohesive, thoughtful trilogy. i’m not sure if haigh was planning on writing more of these and was prevented from doing so, but they don’t contribute much to anda’s story overall, they’re not successful standalones; they aren’t necessary or polished, there’s no sense of growth or closure, none of the characters are in a great place at the end, and the books read more like deleted scenes than finished novels.
anda’s kind of the same through all of them—she takes stupid risks, she comes close but never quite triumphs, and in the second two books, she’s soooo jelly, it’s off-putting. had i never read books 2 and 3, she could have remained in my heart an ambitious daredevil whose major obstacles were her lack of discipline and her performance nerves.
in this one, she’s a straight-up bully.
and the language! gasp! anda calls new girl and RIVAL GYMNAST tracey a bitch a couple of times—which makes 8-year-old karen blush with contact-scandal, but even more scandalous is THIS:
”Mum, no one likes Tracey. She’s rude and stuck up and she’s spoiled Ferndale. We were all happy until she came.”
“The fact is you are being just as much of a bitch as she is, Anda. I didn’t think it was your style!”
mommies don’t call their daughters bitches! i mean, until they’re teenagers, and then it’s just reportage (although, by the time this third book was published, i was myself a teenager—fully, gloriously pottymouthed and probably also a bitch)
and these covers are driving me crazy:
it’s like anda had radical plastic surgery between each book.
the Rival Gymnast cover is the worst, though, because not only does it lack anda-consistency, but it makes the book itself a liar. much is made of the fact that anda and this new wunderkind gymnast tracey look alike:
’She looks like you, Anda!’ exclaimed Kerry.
’She doesn’t!’
’She does! You could be twins.’
Anda frowned at Kerry. OK, it was true. Tracey did look a little like her. Small and bird-like, with hair the colour of caramel toffee.
pretty much every character weighs in on how twinsies they are, even mistaking one for the other at times, which makes anda SO MAD. but on this cover, they do not look like twins in the slightest, their representations are physically inaccurate to their descriptions in the book, and at least one of them appears to be racially inaccurate as well.
also, that’s some intense scrutiny being directed at downtown vajayville, which may have been the story arc intended for book four, but now we will never know.
in short—THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT GYMNASTS. THEY ARE RIVALS.
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fulfilling my vow to read all the sequels i never knew existed to books i loved when i was little. review to come!
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