review

SOMERSAULTS – SHEILA HAIGH

By karen t. brissette

Posted on February 19, 2018

Somersaults by Sheila Haigh
My rating: 3/5 cats
One Star

this book is about 100 pages long and was written in 1987, placing it firmly before the “spoiler panic” phenomenon that plagues us today. in the spirit of that less-fraught time, i’m not going to shy away from discussing most of the plot here, and if this will cause you any discomfort, you should avert your eyes and self-medicate with pictures of internet cats.

The Little Gymnast was one of my favorite books when i was little, and rereading it last year, i was delighted to find that it still had the power to fill me with warm happy feelings.

i was much less delighted to find that there were TWO sequels to the book that i’d never known about and that, as far as i could tell, were never published in the states. so i did what any adult woman trying to recapture her youth would do and i shelled out a whopping $6.32 and $4.54 (incl. shipping) for books 2 and 3, and prepared to be delighted by the continuing adventures of young daredevil anda and her stubborn determination to become a top gymnast. i wanted to read more about her little cottage by hooty stream, her kitten bella, her hippie parents and her loving gran.

alas, the story i made up in my head while i waited by the mailbox was more satisfying than this. it takes place immediately after the events of The Little Gymnast, after anda wins a summer scholarship to train at a top gym in london with superstar coach ian barst. so off she goes to spend two months in the big city, taking away my hopes of getting more hooty stream, kitten bella, hippie parents, gran, and even murgatroyd!

once in london, staying with her tightly-wound and far more affluent auntie moira and her cousin david, who is also conveniently a gymnast, anda proves to be as stubborn and wild as she was back home, breaking a window on her very first day before wandering out alone into the city and causing moira to freak out because urban dangers.

after that, it’s a pretty uneventful book. anda is woefully outmatched by the big-city gymnasts, who have been training for years in a state-of-the-art gym run by an intense coach, and she takes stupid risks to overcompensate and yells at the coach when he tells her she’s out of her league. which pretty much undoes the work of the first book, where she was meant to have learned the discipline and self-control of an athlete and channelled all her rage and excess energy into the rigors of gymnastics and yadda yadda. she’s homesick, she’s sulky, she does dishonor to the memory of millie and mollie by ruining that track suit they were sacrificed for, she learns some gymnastics stuff, she gets her period, she gets jelly when julienne comes to visit and has stuff in common with david that does not interest her, and then she does a really really really stupid thing, almost dies, and has to go home before the end of her training. way to waste your opportunity, anda. she fainted on her first day because she’d been too nervous to eat, so she couldn’t train, she misses training because of menstrual cramps, and then she has to cut her course short because of being a dumbass. but it’s okay because she learned how to do one difficult thing on the bars. i dunno, it just feels like an oddly shaped story, like it should be the middle part of a much longer book.

but here’s the worst part. when anda goes back home after being in london with all the really good gymnasts, the reader can’t help but see anda’s hard-won and highly esteemed ferndale gym club as shabby, rundown, lessened. which naturally affects the way the first book feels in the heart.

in the first book, the story was “poor farmgirl discovers an aptitude for gymnastics and overcomes adversity to compete with girls who have had more advantages but less raw talent.” but this book changes the size of the fish and the size of the pond, and anda’s first-book triumphs feel diminished. also, this cover is kind of awful.