Becoming: Adapted for Young Readers

by Michelle Obama

Overview

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Michelle Obama’s worldwide bestselling memoir, Becoming, is now adapted for young readers.

Michelle Robinson was born on the South Side of Chicago. From her modest beginnings, she would become Michelle Obama, the inspiring and powerful First Lady of the United States, when her husband, Barack Obama, was elected the forty-fourth president. They would be the first Black First Family in the White House and serve the country for two terms.

Growing up, Michelle and her older brother, Craig, shared a bedroom in their family’s upstairs apartment in her great-aunt’s house. Her parents, Fraser and Marian, poured their love and energy into their children. Michelle’s beloved dad taught his kids to work hard, keep their word, and remember to laugh. Her mom showed them how to think for themselves, use their voice, and be unafraid.

But life soon took her far from home. With determination, carefully made plans, and the desire to achieve, Michelle was eager to expand the sphere of her life from her schooling in Chicago. She went to Princeton University, where she learned what it felt like to be the only Black woman in the room. She then went to Harvard Law School, and after graduating returned to Chicago and became a high-powered lawyer. Her plans changed, however, when she met and fell in love with Barack Obama.

From her early years of marriage, and the struggle to balance being a working woman, a wife, and the mom of two daughters, Michelle Obama details the shift she made to political life and what her family endured as a result of her husband’s fast-moving political career and campaign for the presidency. She shares the glamour of ball gowns and world travel, and the difficulties of comforting families after tragedies. She managed to be there for her daughters’ swim competitions and attend plays at their schools without catching the spotlight, while defining and championing numerous initiatives, especially those geared toward kids, during her time as First Lady.

Most important, this volume for young people is an honest and fascinating account of Michelle Obama’s life led by example. She shares her views on how all young people can help themselves as well as help others, no matter their status in life. She asks readers to realize that no one is perfect, and that the process of becoming is what matters, as finding yourself is ever evolving. In telling her story with boldness, she asks young readers: Who are you, and what do you want to become?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593303740
Publisher:	Random House Children's Books
Publication date:	03/02/2021
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	85,864
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)
Lexile:	1080L (what's this?)
Age Range:	10 - 13 Years

About the Author

Michelle Robinson Obama served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School, Mrs. Obama started her career as an attorney at the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin, where she met her future husband, Barack Obama. She later worked in the Chicago mayor’s office, at the University of Chicago, and at the University of Chicago Medical Center. Mrs. Obama also founded the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, an organization that prepares young people for careers in public service.

The Obamas currently live in Washington, D.C., and have two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Read an Excerpt

I spent much of my childhood listening to the sound of striving. It came in the form of bad music, or at least amateur music, coming up through the floorboards of my bedroom—the plink plink plink of students sitting downstairs at my great-­aunt Robbie’s piano, slowly and imperfectly learning their scales. My family lived in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, in a tidy brick bungalow that belonged to Robbie and her husband, Terry. My parents rented an apartment on the second floor, while Robbie and Terry lived on the first. Robbie was my mom’s aunt and had been generous to her over many years, but to me she was kind of a terror. Prim and serious, she directed the choir at a local church and was also our community’s resident piano teacher. She wore sensible shoes and kept a pair of reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She had a sly smile but didn’t appreciate sarcasm the way my mom did. I’d sometimes hear her chewing out her students for not having practiced enough or chewing out their parents for delivering them late to lessons.
“Good night!” she’d exclaim in the middle of the day, with the same blast of exasperation someone else might say, “Oh, for God’s sake!” Few, it seemed, could live up to Robbie’s standards.
The sound of people trying, however, became the soundtrack to our life. There was plinking in the afternoons, plinking in the evenings. Ladies from church sometimes came over to practice hymns. Under Robbie’s rules, kids who took piano lessons were allowed to work on only one song at a time. From my room, I’d listen to them attempting, note by uncertain note, to win her approval, graduating from “Hot Cross Buns” to “Brahms’s Lullaby,” but only after many tries. The music was never annoying; it was just persistent. It crept up the stairwell that separated our space from Robbie’s. It drifted through open windows in summertime, accompanying my thoughts as I played with my Barbies or built little kingdoms made out of blocks. The only break came when my dad got home from an early shift at the city’s water treatment plant and put the Cubs game on TV, boosting the volume just enough to blot it all out.
This was the tail end of the 1960s on the South Side of Chicago. The Cubs weren’t bad, but they weren’t great, either. I’d sit on my dad’s lap in his recliner and listen to him narrate how the Cubs were playing or why Billy Williams, who lived just around the corner from us on Constance Avenue, had such a sweet swing from the left side of the plate. Outside the ballparks, America was in the midst of a massive and uncertain change. The Kennedys were dead. Martin Luther King Jr. had been killed standing on a balcony in Memphis, setting off riots across the country, including in Chicago. The 1968 Democratic National Convention turned bloody as police went after Vietnam War protesters with batons and tear gas in Grant Park, about nine miles north of where we lived. White families, meanwhile, were moving out of the city to the suburbs, drawn by the promise of better schools, more space, and probably more whiteness, too.
None of this really registered with me. I was just a kid, a girl with Barbies and blocks, with two parents and an older brother who slept each night with his head about three feet from mine. My family was my world, the center of everything. My mom taught me how to read early, walking me to the public library, sitting with me as I sounded out words on a page. My dad went to work every day dressed in the blue uniform of a city laborer, but at night he showed us what it meant to love jazz and art. As a boy, he’d taken classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in high school he’d painted and sculpted. He’d been a competitive swimmer and boxer in school, too, and as an adult was a fan of every televised sport, from professional golf to the NHL. He appreciated seeing strong people excel. When my brother, Craig, got interested in basketball, my dad propped coins above the doorframe in our kitchen, encouraging him to leap for them. 
Everything that mattered was within a five-­block radius—my grandparents and cousins, the church on the corner where we were not quite regulars at Sunday school, the gas station where my mom sometimes sent me to pick up a pack of cigarettes, and the liquor store, which also sold Wonder bread, penny candy, and gallons of milk. On hot summer nights, Craig and I dozed off to the sound of cheers from the adult-­league softball games going on at the nearby public park, where by day we climbed on the playground jungle gym and played tag with other kids.

Editorial Reviews

08/06/2021

Gr 6 Up—The groundbreaking autobiography from former first lady Michelle Obama now has a young readers' edition available so kids can marvel at the historic rise of one of America's beloved public figures. Filled with color photos of the celebrated luminary, this title will inspire young people and teach them about the subject's ordinary childhood on the south side of Chicago, and how her loving family and caring community molded her into a bold global leader who impacts generations of people around the world. This intimate memoir examines the intersections of race, class, and perseverance with cadence, style, and nuance. This version maintains the mastery of the original while including updated information about the author's inspiration for her Netflix series Waffles and Mochi. VERDICT This timeless narrative is a must-have for any library collection and is sure to be popular wherever it's shelved.—Christina Vortia, Hype Lit, Land O'Lakes, FL

School Library Journal

★ 2021-03-17
A former first lady shares stories from her life to encourage young readers.

Michelle Robinson was born and raised in a warm and supportive working-class neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. Despite her father’s diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, he continued working as a city laborer while her mother was a homemaker. Both of her parents were staunch believers in education, providing Michelle and her brother with the support they needed to succeed. After attending a magnet high school, she followed her brother to Princeton before she got a law degree from Harvard. It was while working as a lawyer that she met and mentored Barack Obama, a young man of mixed race whose upbringing was vastly different from her own. Nevertheless, they fell in love, married, became parents, and embarked on a remarkable life of activism and politics, culminating in two historic terms in the White House. This young readers’ adaptation follows a similar format to the enormously successful adult original. Obama does not shy away from describing the insecurities she overcame as she acquired her Ivy League education, nor the difficulties she had with her husband’s choice to pursue politics. Anecdotes about her coming-of-age, experiences on the campaign trail, and life in the White House are compelling. Throughout the lively narrative, she expresses an encouraging tone as she tells her story with accessibility and intimacy.

This warm memoir will connect with young readers and inspire them to value their own stories. (photo credits) (Memoir. 10-16)

Kirkus Reviews

"This warm memoir will connect with young readers and inspire them to value their own stories.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

From the Publisher