Customer Reviews

Play Like a Girl: A Celebration of Women in Sports (Henry Holt Young Readers)

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We wanted this book as a gift for a grand daughter who is fast becoming a far better than average competitive athlete herself. As a family we have celebrated her accomplishments and thought this work would underline and reinforce the importance of what she is doing.

Unfortunately the work is a simple 32 pages of bright-color glitz with little or no substance. A few action shots that focus too often on close-up bizarre angles and "artsy" out-of-focus shots rather than meaningful athletic activity or accomplishment are accompanied by 16 quotes that fall short of being the best available by outstanding female athletes.

Those women who are athletes will find it "ho hum" and those who have aspirations and seek encouragement or recognition will need to seek elsewhere than this publication.

Being a published author myself and an ex-daily newspaper sports writer it would be my guess that putting the book together took at most a half dozen hours of layout and photo selection work coupled with a day or so of some journalism intern's leg work to find some usable quotes.

It just doesn't have anything to offer the reader or athlete.

My daughter didn't like it very much. It was a collection of photographs more than anything. And even the photographs weren't very striking. The book was missing poems or a story to go along with the pictures. It was disappointing.