Unflinchingly honest; a memoir in which young readers can find useful lessons.
Adapted for young adults, this edition of a well-received memoir from 2021 chronicles the personal and educational paths of a Black astrophysicist.
By the fourth grade, Oluseyi knew he was different from his peers. The future scholar and scientist read quickly through textbooks unprompted and would “feel restless” waiting for everyone else to catch up. Though from New Orleans, he moved around quite often as a child. During a year and a half of instability, he rotated among nine homes and five schools. But it was in Mississippi, where Oluseyi settled, that he became, by high school, a “committed man of science.” This adaptation keeps the story intact, slightly condensing chapters to highlight material of greatest relevance to the book’s intended audience. The underlying theme of discipline, something Oluseyi learned about while participating in his high school marching band, permeates the second half of the book. Readers learn about his struggles at Tougaloo, a historically Black college near Jackson, with selling and using drugs and his later recovery in rehab. Later, at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Physics, his mentor, the department’s only professor of color, affirms his experiences and pursuits. Readers will delight in the cinematic storytelling and clear, fearless writing, and many will identify with Oluseyi’s unwavering dedication to his educational goals despite setbacks and detours, while others may find inspiration for their own personal and academic journeys.
Unflinchingly honest; a memoir in which young readers can find useful lessons. (photo credits) (Nonfiction. 13-18)Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9781984849632
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Small but mighty necessary reading.
A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.
Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.
Small but mighty necessary reading. (resources) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love.
As palliative for his beloved Abuela's worsening dementia, memoirist Ogle offers her a book of childhood recollections.
Cast in episodic rushes of free verse and paralleling events chronicled in Free Lunch (2019) and Punching Bag (2021), the poems take the author from age 4 until college in a mix of love notes to his devoted, hardworking, Mexican grandmother; gnawing memories of fights and racial and homophobic taunts at school as he gradually becomes aware of his sexuality; and bitter clashes with both his mother, described as a harsh, self-centered deadbeat with seemingly not one ounce of love to give or any other redeeming feature, and the distant White father who threw him out the instant he came out. Though overall the poems are less about the author’s grandmother than about his own angst and issues (with searing blasts of enmity reserved for his birthparents), a picture of a loving intergenerational relationship emerges, offering moments of shared times and supportive exchanges amid the raw tallies of beat downs at home, sudden moves to escape creditors, and screaming quarrels. “My memories of a wonderful woman are written in words and verses and fragments in this book,” he writes in a foreword, “unable to be unwritten. And if it is forgotten, it can always be read again.”
A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love. (Verse memoir. 13-18)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-01995-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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