Book Review - Your Own, Sylvia

"Miss Barnes reviews the Printz honor books" continues! This weekend I read Your Own, Sylvia, by Stephanie Hemphill, a non-fiction recipient of the Printz honor this year. Stephanie Hemphill did an amazing job with this book, which is a collection of poems the Hemphill wrote, using Sylvia Plath's own poems as a guideline. The book takes you through Sylvia's tragically short life, with poems told from the viewpoint of Sylvia's mother Aurelia, boyfriends, friends, acquaintances, and her husband Ted Hughes.

For those of you not familiar with Sylvia Plath, she is a famous American poet who rose to fame in the 1950s and 60's with her poems published in all the major magazines. As a college student at Smith College in Massachusetts, she won a prestigious internship at Mademoiselle magazine. After college, she moved to Great Britain, studying at Cambridge and later settling with her husband Ted Hughes and two young children, in rural England. Sylvia suffered from depression and was an amazingly gifted writer and poet, as well as a terribly complicated person. She authored the book The Bell Jar, which is based on her experience with depression in college. Many factors contributed to her suicide when she was only thirty-one, but she will forever be remembered as a beautiful, gifted woman, who died before her time.

This book reminded me of my own experience reading The Bell Jar, in college, and the one summer I spent on Cape Cod, reading her journals. I had forgotten how vivacious and intense Sylvia was in high school and college, an overachiever that many people will identify with. Sylvia was talked about around campus, admired by guys and girls alike. Many, many men were drawn to her and found themselves falling in love with her. But as pretty and likeable as she was, Sylvia had issues that she had been dealing with since she was a young girl, when her father passed away. She explored these issues in her confessional poetry, and found herself surrounded by the literati, including Ted Hughes, who became one of England's preeminent poets.

Join the millions of women that have found their curiosity's piqued by Sylvia Plath and her genius, by checking out Stephanie Hemphill's Your Own, Sylvia.

* * * * * (five stars)
Recommended for: writers, poets, Sylvia Plath fans, people intrigued by genius, high-schoolers