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Happy To Be Girls by Sarah Davies

Review by Chris Singer

About the author:

Sarah Davies lives with her family in Syracuse, New York. She earned a degree in American Studies at Cornell University. Happy to be Girls was inspired by her nieces, Arianna and Kara, and is her first children’s book.

About the illustrator:

Jenny Mattheson was born and raised in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She earned her BFA in Illustration at the Art Institute of Boston. Her previous books include: The Mouse, the Cat and Grandmother’s Hat by Nancy Willard, and This Is Christmas Morning by Cheryl Ryan Harshman. She currently lives and works in Berkeley, California, and is very happy to be a girl.

About the book:

Do you know a great girl? A wild girl, a free girl? A happy as can be girl? As this fresh, funny take on girl power attests, being a girl is all about being whoever you want to be. A girl can be athletic or artistic, thoughtful or silly or bold. And she can be just as fierce painting a mural as climbing a mountain.

With an energetic rhyming text and luminous illustrations that showcase the diversity of girls at work and play, this is a book to make any girl happy just to be herself, and makes a perfect gift for a favorite girl, whether little or all grown up.

My take on the book:

My wife found this book on our first visit to the our new hometown library and it’s been a constant part of our bedtime reading ever since.

I love the book’s concept of countering the stereotypes many have about girls. The book shows girls being smart, brave and strong while engaging in all sorts of activities such as skateboarding, unicycling, tree-climbing and even misbehaving.

The illustrations are fantastic and do an excellent job of portraying all different types of girls. I thought any young girl looking at this book could find a girl in the book which resembles how she looks or what she likes to do.

I really liked how the book ends with this: “Loud girls, Proud girls, Stand out in the crowd girls. Being just themselves – JUST GIRLS!!”

This is a terrific book to help build self-confidence in girls because it shows girls being whatever they want to be. I would also highly recommend this to teachers/librarians/counselors as a resource as well.

We’ve had a lot of fun at home with the book. My daughter, Tessa, loved it immediately because the cover had two of her current obsessions: a girl with a soccer ball and a girl riding a bike. After a few reads, she got to taking the book out of my hands to study the pictures and look at all the colorful illustrations depicting the girls in action. My wife and I had to give in one night because Tessa insisted on taking it to bed with her. That was a battle we were both too tired to fight and we found Tessa sleeping facedown on the book an hour later. If that’s not a ringing endorsement for a book I don’t know what is!