From the Publisher
"The story is by turns touching and laugh-out-loud funny, and readers will appreciate the time they spend with Joylin, her family, and her friends as they live, grow, and learn as individuals and together." - starred review, School Library Journal
"[Grimes'] accessible verse and clear themes of self-acceptance and open-mindedness ring true. A work that should help adolescent readers find the courage and humor to grow into the individuals they already are." - Kirkus Reviews
"[Grimes'] realistic novel has solid middle-school appeal and avoids preaching." - Horn Book Magazine
"The vocabulary is rich, the characters well-drawn, and the scenes realistic. This is a serious but not too serious look at growing up from a master poet." - Library Media Connection
"Readers will cringe, laugh, and most of all relate to [Joylin's] learning process as it is sensitively and sweetly depicted here. . . . Has broad appeal and solid curricular possibilities." - BCCB
School Library Journal
Gr 5–8—Joylin has always been happy in blue jeans and a t-shirt playing hoops with Jake, her best guy friend. As she turns 13, all of a sudden she begins noticing boys and has to pick out training bras with her mother. Nikki Grimes uses her trademark verse poetry to tell this coming-of-age story (Wendy Lamb Books, 2011) about a young teen who begins to feel like an alien, faces the confusing world of "planet middle school," and tries to figure out exactly who she is. While many have a hard time reading novels in verse, listening to it is an entirely different experience. Poetry is at its best when read aloud, and this novel is no exception. Sisi Aisha Johnson takes Grimes's text and sculpts a very real young girl who is struggling with who she is and who she is becoming. She keeps Joylin's voice just young enough to sound convincing, and deftly handles the secondary characters, such Joylin's concerned mother, her best girlfriend, Jake, and others. Sure to resonate with middle school teens.—Shari Fesko, Southfield Public Library, MI
JUNE 2012 - AudioFile
In this story of a girl in transition, basketball-loving Joylin is caught between gender norms and a changing body. Narrator Sisi Aisha Johnson’s voicing is fresh and full of energy as she transforms the author’s poetic lines into an aural sketch of Joylin’s life, especially her family and friends. The dynamics between Joylin and her two best friends is shifting as Jake starts to see Joylin as a “girl” on and off the basketball court. Johnson’s natural rhythms stay in sync with Grimes’s story, making every moment of the spare text full and round. A.M.P. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
A young tomboy comes of age on and off the basketball court.
In free-flowing free-verse poems, multi–award-winning author and poet Grimes (A Girl Named Mister, 2010, etc.) here explores the riot of hormones and expected gender roles that can make negotiating the preteen years such a challenge. Twelve-year-old Joylin "Jockette" Johnson prefers jeans, T-shirts and one-on-one basketball games with her father or friend Jake to conforming to the more demure, feminine image her mother has of her. Sassy, self-assured Joy enjoys the simple math of her life—"friends / plus family / plus sports"—until she begins to notice "two weird mounds ruining / the perfect flatness / of [her] chest" and gets her first period, which she deems, "the end of life / as I know it." Beset by physical changes, Joy also finds herself witness and prey to unfamiliar behavior; Jake begins to show interest in her friend KeeLee, and Joy herself tries to adopt a more feminine persona to attract the attention of Santiago, a fellow basketballer with "sweet brown curls / bouncing above killer green eyes." Though Grimes' plot development is rather predictable—a life-threatening accident leads Joy to reassess her priorities—her accessible verse and clear themes of self-acceptance and open-mindedness ring true.
A work that should help adolescent readers find the courage and humor to grow into the individuals they already are. (Verse fiction. 9-14)
