Roller Girl

Title: Roller Girl

Author/Illustrator: Victoria Jamieson

Genre: Graphic Novel

Awards: Newbery Honor, Bluebonnet Master List

Age Group: 3rd-8th 

Roller Girl revolves around 12-year-old Astrid and how she came to be a roller derby fanatic. Astrid was completely oblivious to this strange sport until her mom took her and her best, Nicole, to her very first roller derby experience. From then on, she was hooked! She hung up a Rainbow Bite (her favorite jammer of all time) poster on her ceiling and gets a new helmet and these awesome rainbow socks (a gift from Nicole). She decides that she is going to follow her destiny of becoming a great skater by going to a roller derby boot camp over the summer, with Nicole, of course. Unfortunately, things don't exactly go as planned. It turned out that Nicole did not want to go to derby camp after all, and to make matters worse, Nicole was hanging out with Rachel. Rachel, as in the arch-nemesis-since-the-squirrel-playground-incident Rachel. Astrid has to face derby camp alone, and she's off to a bit of a rocky start at first. On the bright side, she meets Zoey, who helps transform her into a blue-haired roller girl. They quickly become good friends and practice hard together, even after camp. Astrid begins leaving notes on the locker of her roller derby idol, Rainbow Bite. When she sends Astrid notes of encouragement back, things start to look better for Astrid. She continues to work hard and even gets to participate in a special bout at a roller derby event coming up! Meanwhile, she loses her friendship with Nicole and has been exposed for lying to her mom about the fact that Nicole hasn't actually been at derby camp. The book ends on a happy note, though. Astrid (now Asteroid!) participates in the derby bout and takes a hit for her team. Zoey gets to be a jammer for the first time and gets a special surprise from Astrid in the audience. And, in the end, Astrid made peace with Nicole (and extended the olive branch to Rachel, even though it was hard), even though they parted their separate ways. Astrid finally got to meet Rainbow Bite and is living her roller girl dream!

This was such a cute graphic novel! I would for sure buy this book for my classroom. I was a little bit nervous because I thought reading a graphic novel would be torture for some reason (I guess all I can think about is Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants, which is all we have in my house with 3 younger brothers 😂). On the contrary, this was a quick, easy, and fun read!

I would recommend Roller Girl for 3rd through 8th graders. The reading level is relatively low and there is not a lot of text on each page which makes it very readable for younger students (not to mention all of the illustrations are very expressive). A major theme that runs throughout this book is the idea of growing up/coming of age and all the swirls of emotions that come along with that! There's friend, enemy, and mom-drama, and I think a lot of middle schoolers will be able to relate to Astrid's problems with Nicole. It did make me sad at the end, though, because it made it seem like Astrid and Nicole (despite having made peace) were kind of done hanging out and being friends.

To go along with Roller Girl, I would have students first discuss what they liked and didn't like about this book as a graphic novel. It would also be fun to have the students try out making a little comic strip of their own! They could also think of what their "punny" roller derby name would be (Astrid's was Asteroid) and explain why they would choose that name.