Roller Rink Starlight: A Memoir

A nostalgic tour down an unforgettable moment in time, filled with compelling characters and charming remembrances, all forming a memorable literary experience. Roller Rink Starlight written by William Hart, tells the story of his coming of age and the sometimes painful, yet always entertaining life lessons that come with it.

With great courage he describes the exhilaration and frustrations of first love. The Alaskan landscape in which the Roller rink takes place is a lovingly detailed feast for the imagination. The youthful social structure is presented with great effect and his first love Katy Linsey, is a charming aspect to the overall narrative.

Teenage life is generally an odyssey of tiny failures, exciting triumphs, and great embarrassments. Hart is perfectly at home in each of these defining elements of his youth. Parents are starting to pull away or rather allowing the kids to build their own identities. New friends and girls become important influences and we see Hart blossom from his newfound freedom.

Roller Rink Starlight is a compelling memoir that succeeds where many similar works within the overstuffed genre fail. In fact, Hart masterfully steers the book over all the usual pitfalls that stifle lesser authors as they set out to recall their past. He never comes off as self-important or self-serving. There is a fresh and lively atmosphere that permeates throughout the whole book. The author uses commendable moderation and restraint in his descriptions. Sentences never felt too flowery nor do the sections drag.

Readers in today’s world have many avenues in which to indulge their appetites for biography, nonfiction, or memoirs. In this overabundance of content, the common criticism of lesser memoirs is that many are merely uninteresting. The narrative of a person’s life fails to move the indifferent reader and the book suffers. When an engaging memoir like this one does rise above the crowd it can be reviving to the reader.

This lovely book achieves this lofty goal and then some. It perfectly captures that essential need and desire for storytellers to share their experiences. For a life story to take flight and separate itself from its primary participant. This book is an experience, a rich, colorful, charming, and elegantly crafted experience. One that any reader would be pleased to take part in and which many similar books strive to duplicate.