The text begins, “I always dream.” The “I” of the text thus gives way to the “we” of the page, a visual interpretation leading to an ultimate message of group empowerment.Įnsuing spreads offer fantastic visions of these three girls living their dreams. Instead, they’re decorated with circular patterns that dominated the jacket’s background, momentarily distancing readers from the title’s “Me.” This distance allows readers to absorb the sight of not one girl, but three, on the first spread of the book proper, their eyes closed as if asleep. With her placement on the cover, readers are encouraged to read this girl as the titular “Me,” centering her as the presumed protagonist.īut then Crews performs an artistic sleight of hand, easing readers into endpapers and front matter devoid of photographs. The expression Crews captured on her face is so joyful that you can almost hear the giggle the girl must’ve made as she struck a pose for the camera. Johnson’s first-person title invokes one girl, and Crews’s jacket art depicts a solitary Black girl striding confidently over a collaged city skyline. The illustrations excel in their “recognition of a child audience” by delivering a message of girls’ empowerment through playful art that moves from dreamscapes to realistic settings. Crews’s art for Angela Johnson’s poetic text in A Girl Like Me capitalizes on that juxtaposition. I’ve always loved how Nina Crews’s photocollages juxtapose photographic realism with compositional flights of fancy in ways that indulge children’s frequent interest in seeing other real kids in books, as well as their propensity for imaginative play.

A Girl Like Me by Angela Johnson