e-Audio, 00:51:35
Narrated by: Renée Watson
Fine Art by: Ekua Holmes
Release Date: February 6, 2024
Published by: Kokila
Read from: February 5-6, 2024
Stand-alone
Source: PRH App (I received a copy of this audiobook from the Publisher in exchange for a just and honest review. This did nothing to influence my review.)
TW:
For Readers Interested In: Poetry, YA, Non-Fiction, ContemporaryAward-winning author and poet Renée Watson looks back at her childhood and urges readers to look forward at their futures with love, understanding, and celebration in this fully illustrated poetry collection.
New York Times-bestselling author Renée Watson writes about her experience growing up a young Black girl at the intersections of race, class, and gender in this semi-autobiographical collection of poems with full color art throughout by celebrated fine artist Ekua Holmes.
Using a mixture of poetic forms from haiku and tanka to prose poems and free verse, Watson shares recollections of her childhood in Portland, tender odes to the Black women in her life, and urgent calls for Black girls to step into their power. This is both a gift and a tool for anyone who reads it. Black Girl You Are Atlas encourages young readers to embrace their future with a shared sense of anger, celebration, and sisterhood.
*MY THOUGHTS*
I really don’t know how to review this. I mean, this is a memoir in like different forms of poetry. What I can say is, the way it was written I feel like I found out so much more about the author and I hope to get to know the author even more.
The first thing I want to bring up is the writing style. I love Watson’s writing. In everything that I’ve read by her I have loved all of it. And saying I hate poetry makes me really impressed by this. Because I was reading this in tandem and I fell head first for this book. And the way it was written to follow her life was pretty cool. And I don’t know why, but the fact that there are different poems was also pretty cool. I went through and looked up some of them and tried to figure out the different types of poem each one was. It was just pretty cool.
And the art? Pairing it with the words, and then pairing that combo with the audio, I LOVED IT. I’m not a huge poetry girl, but with this fine art, it made the book go way above 5 stars for me. Trust me when I tell you this book is going to live rent free in my head for a long time. I’m not kidding you when I tell you that I want some of these as prints for my walls. And like, even the cover is amazing? This book is so so good.
And the narration of course is incredible. There’s no way to put into words what I feel about the narration. Again, I’m not a fan of poetry, but whenever the author is the narrator, it just works. They always know when to do voice inflections and they knew how they wanted to make each one sound in their heads. Its just like an own voices narrator, they just always work better.
This was so different than what I normally “like,” but it was well worth the trek into something else. I can’t believe if given different circumstances I might have said I didn’t like poetry or something. I would have missed out on this amazing book. And trust me, I’m much more interested in poetry now that I’ve read it.
Overall, I give this
