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My Honest Book Review – Just Ask by Sonia Sotomayor

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As far back as I can remember, I have always had a love for reading. I love being able to pick up a book and immediately be transplanted to a different time or place. As a child, reading was a way of escape for me, a way to live vicariously through someone else.

It was very easy for me to identify with characters in the books I read because a lot of them were just like me. A white girl from suburbia with a two-parent household. I never knew how much I took that for granted. I never knew that there were other kids who longed to have a literary character that they could relate to. One whose life resembled their own.

Over the past few years I have realized just how hard it is to find books that have characters that represent all types of people from all kinds of backgrounds. After we adopted our daughter I tried to find a book for her that would explain adoption in a way that would resonate with her specific adoption story. Fast forward to four years later and I still haven’t found the right book. I’ve come to the conclusion that I may just have to write my own.

When I ran across Sonia Sotomayor’s book Just Ask at the library, I had no idea that I was going to fall in love with it. Sotomayor starts the book with a letter to the reader introducing herself and explaining why she wrote this book. When she was seven years old she was diagnosed with diabetes, and as a result always felt like she was ‘different.’

She goes on to explain that she wrote the book to “explain how differences make us stronger in a good way.”

The book begins with a group of children who have gathered together to start a garden. Sotomayor highlights the physical differences between plants and that they need different things to help them grow.

The remainder of the book introduces the characters and each one has something about them that makes them ‘different.’ Each character has an entire page dedicated to their story, and Sotomayor brilliantly does two things. First, she states something noticeable about the difference and then proceeds to highlight something positive about that difference, in essence making the character seem cool or unique.

For example, one child is blind. So the character explains that while they cannot see with their eyes, their other senses are heightened.

I was very impressed with the long list of differences that she highlights in her book. The list includes diabetes, asthma, needing a wheelchair, blind, deaf, dyslexia, autism, stutter, ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, food allergies and down syndrome.

Each character also reinforces the idea of the book title, “Just Ask.” The character encourages the reader to just ask if you have questions about what you see or if there’s something you don’t understand. The reader is encouraged to ask the person themselves or ask their parents.

I love that in Just Ask, Sotomayor is inspiring the reader to not be scared of things that are different but to just ask and gain knowledge and insight by learning about the differences instead.

At the end of the book, Just Ask, Sotomayor adeptly goes back and ties in the garden analogy from the beginning of the book. It would not be good if the garden only had one type of vegetable. If your garden was only full of carrots you would miss out on all of the other wonderful vegetables out there like tomatoes, green beans, and potatoes. By the same token, if everyone in the world was the same then we would miss out on so many beautiful things. Everyone has something unique to contribute to the world.

What other books have you read that highlight our differences in a positive light?

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