Penguin/Random House/Viking, 2023
A GIRL CAN BUILD ANYTHING is co-authored by a power-duo of writers who know kids well and write for them superbly, e.E. Charlton-Trujillo and Pat Zietlow Miller . Illustrator Keisha Morris provides the perfect complement to the well-paced and inspiring text with intensely colorful and engagingly constructive scenes, if you'll pardon the obvious pun. Images from envisioning possibilities to bringing dreams to the real world are action-based but reveal powerful emotional strengths as well..
"Girls" are shown to be young, teen, and adult, working in collaboration to innovate, renovate, design and build every manner of useful and creative items and structures. Tools of the trade (there I go again) are pictured and named within natural language and sequential images to provide models of success... and failure.
Some of my favorite lines in the book follow such a failure:
"Take a breath.
Take a break.
Then...
try again.
Because failure
isn't final.
It's where new
ideas are made."
A circle of girls, viewed from above, surrounds those words, joined as if in a familiar mantra of determination and persistence. Around the perimeter of their faces and enfolded arms are the tools they have used, will use, will master to make those dreams and ideas reality.
In their present lives and in their own futures.
As designers, collaborators, dreamers, and builders of better communities, structures, and a new world.
Highly recommended for ALL readers. Girls of course, but equally valuable for youth of all identities.
Check out past reviews of some amazing women builders in posts HERE, HERE, and HERE.
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