Affirming life lessons to encourage athletes, creatives, and everyday dreamers.
A Black principal dancer who broke many barriers offers empowering advice for youth.
In this book that’s organized into five chapters that correspond with ballet positions, Copeland, in collaboration with children’s author Smith, explores attitude, self-discovery, adversity, challenges, and meaningful living. Delivered in the caring tone of a trusted mentor or big sister, this thoughtful work is inspired by Copeland’s conversations with and mail from young people. The contents riff on common concerns about growing up—meeting familial expectations, navigating friendships, setting goals, and dealing with criticism and negativity online and in real life. Gracefully balancing personal experience and time-tested wisdom, Copeland’s insights about body positivity and self-image deftly address complex feelings of being othered. Topics like self-care, shyness, goal setting, and dealing with self-doubt and disappointment are part of the overall upbeat reflections. The forward-looking final chapter includes guided activities to encourage reflection, visualization, and self-directed action. Copeland’s remarkable achievements serve as touch points that are bound to inspire readers. The writing is clear, reassuring, and comforting, the positivity of Copeland’s voice will appeal to a variety of readers, and while there is some repetition, this element effectively allows the work to be sampled as needed rather than read cover to cover. As a trailblazing hero with a distinguished career, Copeland takes a grounded approach that invites readers to become their most authentic selves at every turn.
Affirming life lessons to encourage athletes, creatives, and everyday dreamers. (Nonfiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781534443037
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
With young readers diagnosed with anxiety in ever increasing numbers, this book offers a necessary mirror to many.
Young Raina is 9 when she throws up for the first time that she remembers, due to a stomach bug. Even a year later, when she is in fifth grade, she fears getting sick.
Raina begins having regular stomachaches that keep her home from school. She worries about sharing food with her friends and eating certain kinds of foods, afraid of getting sick or food poisoning. Raina’s mother enrolls her in therapy. At first Raina isn’t sure about seeing a therapist, but over time she develops healthy coping mechanisms to deal with her stress and anxiety. Her therapist helps her learn to ground herself and relax, and in turn she teaches her classmates for a school project. Amping up the green, wavy lines to evoke Raina’s nausea, Telgemeier brilliantly produces extremely accurate visual representations of stress and anxiety. Thought bubbles surround Raina in some panels, crowding her with anxious “what if”s, while in others her negative self-talk appears to be literally crushing her. Even as she copes with anxiety disorder and what is eventually diagnosed as mild irritable bowel syndrome, she experiences the typical stresses of school life, going from cheer to panic in the blink of an eye. Raina is white, and her classmates are diverse; one best friend is Korean American.
With young readers diagnosed with anxiety in ever increasing numbers, this book offers a necessary mirror to many. (Graphic memoir. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-545-85251-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
For every dreaming girl (and boy) with a pencil in hand (or keyboard) and a story to share.
A multiaward–winning author recalls her childhood and the joy of becoming a writer.
Writing in free verse, Woodson starts with her 1963 birth in Ohio during the civil rights movement, when America is “a country caught / / between Black and White.” But while evoking names such as Malcolm, Martin, James, Rosa and Ruby, her story is also one of family: her father’s people in Ohio and her mother’s people in South Carolina. Moving south to live with her maternal grandmother, she is in a world of sweet peas and collards, getting her hair straightened and avoiding segregated stores with her grandmother. As the writer inside slowly grows, she listens to family stories and fills her days and evenings as a Jehovah’s Witness, activities that continue after a move to Brooklyn to reunite with her mother. The gift of a composition notebook, the experience of reading John Steptoe’s Stevieand Langston Hughes’ poetry, and seeing letters turn into words and words into thoughts all reinforce her conviction that “[W]ords are my brilliance.” Woodson cherishes her memories and shares them with a graceful lyricism; her lovingly wrought vignettes of country and city streets will linger long after the page is turned.
For every dreaming girl (and boy) with a pencil in hand (or keyboard) and a story to share. (Memoir/poetry. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-25251-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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