The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson

Title: The Day You Begin
Author: Jacqueline Woodson
Illustrator: Rafael López
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
ISBN: 9780399246531

“There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you until the day you begin to share your stories.”

The Day You Begin by Jacqueline Woodson considers the difficulty of entering a room where you don’t know anyone. In these situations, we become “an only” until we share our personal stories. We are all different, whether this is our accent so “no one understands the way words curl from your mouth.” Or it could be the food we eat that is “too strange or too unfamiliar for others to love as you do.”

One character tells classmates why she didn’t travel through the summer like other students. She cared for her summer but “Even though we were right on our block it was like we got to go EVERYWHERE.” Woodson reminds us that we are all outsiders and it takes courage to be ourselves. “There will be times when you walk into a room and no one there is quite like you until the day you begin/ to share your stories.”