Hopeful and determined.
Nonbinary professional skateboarder Baker shares their passion for skating, their experience in an industry with little support for those who are not White cisgender men, and how they reclaimed their identity and career on their own terms.
As a child, Baker, who is White, fell in love with skateboarding while watching their foster brothers on a backyard ramp. That thrill grew when they got their first board. Unfortunately, as their career took off with sponsorships and international competitions, Baker learned the difference between skateboarding for pleasure and the business side of the sport, as their corporate sponsors tried to control and define their image. Years after those companies tossed them aside, Baker found their way back, determined to make space for more people to express themselves freely through skating. In this short memoir, Baker tells a story that weaves together their discovery of their gender identity with their experiences in the professional skating world. Their casual language creates a natural flow, like an intimate conversation with a close friend. Relationships with supportive family and friends—particularly their mother, who encouraged them to focus on passion, not winning—play a significant role in Baker’s memories. They provide honest critiques of the exploitation and inequity within the skating industry while emphasizing the joy of community and the work done by skaters from some underrepresented groups. Ultimately, Baker upholds the importance of remaining true to oneself while pursuing a dream.
Hopeful and determined. (Memoir. 13-18)Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-22347-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
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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