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Sonia Sotomayor’s powerful and inspiring story deserves a better treatment than this sentimental and often clunky narrative. Bernier-Grand includes poems about the justice’s education, her activism, her diabetes, her divorce and her love of the New York Yankees and of New York City, stressing throughout Sotomayor’s admiration for her mother. It is described as “free verse,” but there's little actual poetry, despite the arrangement of words on the page. "The Princeton student who couldn't write well / is now the editor of the Yale Law Journal. / After graduating as a lawyer from Yale Law School, / Sonia works at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office..." There's a certain sloppiness of ideas, too: The verses that mention Cardinal Spellman High School, Sotomayor’s alma mater, take nuns to task when the school was also administered by religious brothers and priests, and in the prose summary, “Legend has it that Sonia saved baseball” seems an odd use of the term, "legend." Gonzalez’s pictures, while romanticized, are rich and strong in color and conception. Alas, this hasty-feeling collection does little justice to its subject. (glossary, timeline, bibliography, notes) (Poetry/biography. 8-14)
