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Roller Babes: The Story of the Roller Derby Queen
After tightening her laces with shaking hands, Lottie glanced at the other skaters, who had already rolled awkwardly around the big track. Each skater's unsteady movements made a low rumble sound that reverberated throughout the empty Armory. The pounding of skates on the wooden surface made it difficult to hear normal voices. The skaters glided and stretched their legs; up on the big track each person appeared larger than life. Lottie noticed that the guys looked so much bigger and faster than the small group of girls. Maybe, she thought, her father was right. What A League of Their Own is to women's baseball, Roller Babes is to women's professional roller derby. Set in the 1950s, Roller Babes dramatically captures the story of Lottie Karla Zimmerman's inspirational rise from the tenements of the Bronx to her stardom as the Roller Derby queen. Her road is anything but smooth as she tangles with love, loss, and the 'bad" girls of the banked track. The widely watched yet underappreciated sport of Roller Derby comes to life in Roller Babes , reminding us not only of a simpler time but also of the power of the human spirit to overcome enormous obstacles.
- GenresRoller Derby
247 pages, Paperback
First published December 14, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 31, 2011
Dumb. Who was this written for? Nine-year old girls? Wait. That's an insult to my own nine-year old. She would thumb her nose at this one and everyone in my house loved Whip-It. Do not read this book! It is a huge waste of your time. I only wasted 5 pages worth of my life- and even that was toooooo long.
July 10, 2014
I read this book so that you don't have to.
A great piece of cover art disguises utterly irredeemable prose. A serviceable outline of a plot, and an intriguing era—early 1950's professional Roller Derby—does nothing to outweigh this painful reading experience. Only stubbornness—and anger, quite frankly—gave me the energy to keep picking up this book each time I set it down. I would give it zero stars if that would further diminish the book's overall rating, but alas that is not an option.
Everything is two-dimensional here. The author's leaden prose depicts unconvincing, unbelievable characters who clump through the motions of the story like plastic playing pieces in a board game.
Unnatural dialogue is perhaps the worst sin. For the first third of the novel the author tediously attempts to cram in every mid-century colloquialism ever uttered. There's barely a line of dialogue without one, and barely a single repetition of one. After the author exhausts McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions, he abandons this forced conceit, and there's barely a blip of it for the remainder of the book.
While there is some semblance of character development for the protagonist Lottie, and the story at least moves forward in something of a linear fashion; each stage of her story is flat and underdeveloped. Later scenes grow increasingly idiotic.
Melodramatic scenes are artificially staged and awkwardly executed. Boom! There is a double suicide. Boom! A disgruntled skater with a gun. Boom! A sexual assault. Boom! Homophobic threats on the streets of San Francisco. Scenes strike without warning like bolts from the blue, are finished within a page or two, and have no significant impact on the storyline, and have no aftereffects.
A terrible, self-published work—tragic, really—that could only have been possibly redeemed by a ghost writer completely rewriting this from scratch.
A great piece of cover art disguises utterly irredeemable prose. A serviceable outline of a plot, and an intriguing era—early 1950's professional Roller Derby—does nothing to outweigh this painful reading experience. Only stubbornness—and anger, quite frankly—gave me the energy to keep picking up this book each time I set it down. I would give it zero stars if that would further diminish the book's overall rating, but alas that is not an option.
Everything is two-dimensional here. The author's leaden prose depicts unconvincing, unbelievable characters who clump through the motions of the story like plastic playing pieces in a board game.
Unnatural dialogue is perhaps the worst sin. For the first third of the novel the author tediously attempts to cram in every mid-century colloquialism ever uttered. There's barely a line of dialogue without one, and barely a single repetition of one. After the author exhausts McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions, he abandons this forced conceit, and there's barely a blip of it for the remainder of the book.
While there is some semblance of character development for the protagonist Lottie, and the story at least moves forward in something of a linear fashion; each stage of her story is flat and underdeveloped. Later scenes grow increasingly idiotic.
Melodramatic scenes are artificially staged and awkwardly executed. Boom! There is a double suicide. Boom! A disgruntled skater with a gun. Boom! A sexual assault. Boom! Homophobic threats on the streets of San Francisco. Scenes strike without warning like bolts from the blue, are finished within a page or two, and have no significant impact on the storyline, and have no aftereffects.
A terrible, self-published work—tragic, really—that could only have been possibly redeemed by a ghost writer completely rewriting this from scratch.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews