LEARNING TO FALL

A girl learns life lessons through skateboarding.

When 12-year-old Daphne is sent to Oakland to stay with her father for the summer so her mother can pursue her acting career in Prague, she feels resentful. Daphne hasn’t seen her father since before her 10th birthday, when he was supposed to meet her at a skate park to teach her some skills but didn’t show up. Trying to do a trick on her own, Daphne broke her arm and subsequently quit skateboarding. Now in Oakland, Daphne is cold toward her recovering alcoholic father and refuses his attempts to get her to skateboard with him. The tepid, formulaic plot and tentative voice of the first half of this story (overexplaining is rampant, as are tropey expressions of anxiety—the stomach features prominently) give way by the end to a more assured, original voice and welcome nuance in the characterizations of Daphne and her parents. The depictions of alcoholism through the eyes of Daphne and the adults affected are honest and unromanticized—possibly the strongest part of the book—while the skateboarding theme is integrated fairly successfully. Readers will enjoy the descriptions of skateboarding tricks, but the skateboarding-as-a-metaphor-for-life angle is at first too heavy-handed; by the end of the story it becomes more subtle. Main characters read White; two significant secondary characters are Mexican American.

Not without glitches but, overall, an honest story about alcoholism and forgiveness.