Wouldn't it be awesome if African American memoirs-in-verse just started flooding the children's market? (Or the entire book market, for that matter.) I really liked the sonnet structure and the perspective of being the daughter of one of the first career Air Force African Americans. I didn't feel like I got to know the speaker and her friends and family quite as well as everyone in Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming (the obvious 2014 comparison) and thus didn't experience quite the same stirrings, but all the same, this book offers a unique perspective couched in a turbulent decade. ( )

Marilyn Nelson has written a poem for every major event in her life. Her life experiences in the 50's cover a range of issues from feminism, to civil rights, even to the atom bomb. A middle school English class would gain a unique perspective from this memoir. ( )

This is a memoir in poems, encompassing 10 years of Nelson's life from 1950-1960. There are a few poems for each year, but what is significant and touching is that it encompasses not only her personal life (ages 4 to 14), but also national events. She was the daughter of "one of the first African-American career officers in the Air Force" and within the 10 year span lived at least 5 different places. There is a lot of material here for reflection. Often her family was the "first Negro" in a variety of settings -- sometimes the first in the town or school as shown in the poem "Making History." This was both a burden and an opportunity, especially in this particular era. Nelson captures these themes with grace and brevity and depth, staying true to the viewpoint and understanding of her age at the time. In the poem "Telling Time" (age 5) she simplifies: "Past is before now; future is after. Now is a five-minute eternity." Other reflections of the era include "Bomb Drill" "Sputnik" and more personally "The Queen of 6th Grade" because really our history starts with us and the wider world gradually intrudes. ( )

RGG: To benefit from the multiple layers of these poems, readers need to savor each one in this beautiful brief memoir. It would be good to know from the beginning that the poems are in the format of sonnets with iambic pentameter. Reading Interest: 13-YA.