Stronger Than She Thinks

PreS-Gr 2–Nancy Kerrigan’s picture book memoir reflects on her inner strength during the earliest moments of her figure skating career. The movement of the text echoes the active illustrations, including her toe loops, salchows, and lutzs. Straightforward inspiration for very young audiences.

With Van Cleave, Olympic medalist Kerrigan (b. 1969) writes a spirited autobiographical story about her childhood entry into ice skating. In Putra’s dynamic and saturated illustrations, Kerrigan appears in constant motion, while font-size changes emphasize verbs including darted and zoomed. Kerrigan finds ice skating “exhilarating,” and when her parents encourage her dream despite tight finances (“Nancy’s dad worked three jobs, and her mom didn’t work outside the home because she was blind”), she practices endlessly, continuing to train even with too-small skates, and working to problem-solve…

Olympic-winning figure skater Kerrigan looks back on her childhood.

Going for unvarnished role modeling, Kerrigan leaves her later experiences—including her 1994 attack at the hands of assailants hired by rival skater Tonya Harding’s ex-husband—for readers to find elsewhere. Instead, she focuses on her early love of skating (“Blasting across the slick rink was exhilarating!”), the ease with which she left fellow student skaters behind, and obstacles she had to surmount on the way to shining in competition, from squeezing into skates that she had outgrown to working at landing a clean axel. The story glosses over these challenges, however—she is depicted…

A bland pep talk.(Picture-book autobiography. 6-8)—Kirkus Reviews, Kirkus