Book Review: My Selma

 

My Selma

True Stories of a Southern Childhood at the Height of the Civil Rights Movement

by Willie Mae Brown

Pub Date 03 Jan 2023 

 Macmillan Children's Publishing Group,  Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

 Biographies & Memoirs  |  Children's Nonfiction  |  History 

I am reviewing a copy of My Selma through Macmillan Children's Publishing Group and Netgalley:

In My Selma Willie Mae Brown combines family stories of the everyday and the extraordinary as seen through the eyes of her twelve-year-old self.  This book is an unforgettable portrayal of her coming of age in a town at the crossroads of history.

In Selma Alabama un 1965 many things are happening in the Brown's house as well as outside of it, that does not have anything to do with the Landmark 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Yet the famous outrages which unfold on that span form an inescapable backdrop in this collection of stories. In one, Willie Mae takes it upon herself to offer summer babysitting services to a glamorous single white mother a secret she keeps from her parents that unravels with shocking results. In another, Willie Mae reluctantly joins her mother at a church rally, and is forever changed after hearing Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a defiant speech in spite of a court injunction. 

My Selma captures the voice and vision of a fascinating young person perspicacious, impetuous, resourceful, and even mystical in her ways of seeing the world around her who gifts us with a loving portrayal of her hometown while also delivering a no-holds-barred indictment of the time and place.

I give My Selma five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!