Starred review from October 1, 2022
Gr 7 Up-Her ancestry, as it can be traced with names, goes back to Amy Coleman, an enslaved woman who bore her white enslaver's child. Young appeared seven generations later, her lineage explored in a mesmerizing memoir-in-verse "about girlhood and how the world scoffs at the way Black women come of age...because Black girls begin being called women far before they know what women really are." Poetry, she insists, is "the only way to tell this story." Performing her own history, her very life, Young's impassioned delivery channels centuries of abuse and joy, pain and hope, suffering and forgiveness, and most of all, unconditional, unrelenting love. Young is just 19, a Swarthmore College student, and Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States. VERDICT Young's double debut-as writer and narrator-is an inarguable achievement, her prodigious success a promise of further recognition to come.
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