The power of a determined voice

When Sarah Aronson was a nine-year-old girl growing up in Pennsylvania, she writes in the Author's Note to her new book, Abzuglutely: Battling, Bellowing Bella Abzug (Calkins Creek, 2025), she learned about a woman named Bella with a strong New York accent and a powerful voice that let people know what she believed. 

Years later Aronson decided to write a picture book about her childhood heroine. 

Bella grew up as a young Jewish girl in the Bronx, the daughter of immigrants, Aronson tells us, and she was "never a sugar-and-spice gal." 

From her parents Bella learned about Tikkun olam--a Jewish value that means repairing the world and eliminating injustice and inequality. Determined to make a difference in the world, to make the world a better place, she devoted her life to bringing justice into the world for everyone, not just for Jews. 

With her big hats and loud voice, Bella could be seen as a strident example of how a woman should not behave. But for many Bella was leading the way to help make the world a better place, just as she'd hoped to do as a child. 

Bella's voice made a difference in the world, Aronson tells us. Bella became a lawyer. She raised money for causes and organizations that she believed deserved support. She led protests and fought for the rights of women and equal rights and education for everyone. She organized large rallies against the Vietnam War.

She stood up to one of the most despicable senators in American history--Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. She believed in protecting the environment. She believed in racial equality. She believed in social justice. 

As Aronson writes, "Bella was a trailblazer." She became the second Jewish woman to serve in Congress, and her victory was proof, as Aronson explains, that the voices of young girls and women matter in the world. 

If you speak like Bella with courage and passion for what matters to you, Aronson suggests, you can make a difference in people's lives.

In the end, Bella's story is a story about the courage to stand out and be yourself, to use your voice to call out injustice, to believe in yourself as a woman who has the power to change things and not submit to society's expectations of women as weak or subservient. It's a story about speaking your truth to the world.

But Bella's story is also a story about love--not just about Bella's love of justice and fairness for all but of Aronson's love for Bella, a woman who showed the author when she was a young Jewish girl growing up in Pennsylvania that she could be a girl with a strong voice who didn't have to be someone she wasn't, and that she could grow up to become a woman with a strong voice of her own... speaking and writing her own truth. 

Bravo, Bella, and bravo, Sarah Aronson, for inspiring young people--both girls and boys--to be themselves, to make the world a fair place for all, and to not shy away from speaking and writing the truth.

For more information about Abzuglutely, take a look at these reviews:

School Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

The Horn Book

And for more information about Sarah Aronson, visit her website: 

https://saraharonson.com/

What’s Luck Got To Do With It?

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our successes, as well as our failures, are attributable to luck.

If we finish a story, or find an agent, or publish a book, we often say it’s because of luck, or the stars are aligned, or someone above is offering a helping hand.

It’s the same if we make a mistake, or can’t sell our work, or our book fails to gain readers—we say it’s just bad luck, or the timing is off, or it isn’t our day.

This kind of thinking pays scant attention to the skills involved in making our “luck” happen and diminishes the large amount of work that we put into our efforts.

Our luck—whether we succeed or fail—has less to do with these “outside” influences and more to do with our own “inner” attitude toward what we do, our dedication to our work and our confidence in our abilities to perform a task well.

This is, ultimately, what Ari Fish, the 12 year old protagonist of Sarah Aronson’s novel, Beyond Lucky, learns over the course of the story, but it doesn’t come easily.

At the outset of the story, Ari believes in luck to the point where he hesitates to leave the house before reading his horoscope to make sure it offers a positive view of the day.

It’s both funny and sad watching Ari grapple with this deeply held superstition. And it’s his deep need to believe in luck that both drives the plot of this hard-to-put-down story and serves, ultimately, as his undoing.

Here’s how Aronson introduces us to Ari and his superstitious ways in the first chapter: 

     Call me obsessive, but first I eat a bowl of frosted cornflakes with half a cup of puffed rice and one-third of a banana, because this is what I ate before the first time I kicked a ball over Mac’s head. Under my jersey, I wear my brother Sam’s U Mass T-shirt, the one I stole out of his trunk the day he announced to my family that he was dropping out of college to fight California wildfires. Since Sam is still the highest scorer in league history, I do the same fifty push-ups he did. Then I recite the American presidents in order, first to last, while I stare at the poster of my hero, Wayne Timcoe, the only Somerset Valley High player to ever make it to the pros.

 That’s a lot of superstition weighing on Ari, but there’s more: 

     I sit on my bed and stretch my hamstrings. Before we leave, I would really like to read my daily horoscope as well as “Steve the Sports Guy: Real Advice for Real Men.” But today of all days, the paper is late.
     It’s an extremely bad omen.

What’s interesting about this collection of superstitions is that they are the very strands of plot out of which Aronson weaves this tale. Ari’s love of soccer and desire to excel like his brother, his love of his brother and fear for his safety as a firefighter, his idolization of Wayne Timcoe, and his devotion to the advice column for guys.

And when Ari, a collector of sports cards, finds himself with a Wayne Timcoe card, one of the hardest to obtain, he feels he’s gotten assurance from the invisible gods of luck that his luck (in soccer, in life) will be guaranteed.

Through it all, Aronson also manages to introduce a likeable and compelling rivalry between Ari and his best friend, Mac, and Parker, the only girl on their soccer team.

Aronson lovingly shares Ari’s story using the voice of a 12-year-old that’s filled with the kind of worries and humor that a 12-year-old boy would share with his friends, teammates, and even his parents.

As the story unfolds from one crisis to another, and Ari discovers that the card he placed such faith in isn’t in fact a guarantee for luck, Aronson shows us how Ari’s attitude toward luck begins to change when his lucky card is lost: 

     I stay up late, overanalyzing everything that has gone wrong.
     Sam didn’t call, even though he promised he would. I’m sure it only means what it always means. There was another fire. Otherwise, he would have called.
     I can’t consider anything else.
     The non-call has nothing to do with my horrible luck.
     And my horrible luck has nothing to do with the card. Or Parker. Or Mac. It’s just a coincidence. These things happen. Luck gets better. Then it gets worse. Then it gets better. It is a wave just like Steve the Sports Guy said. In a couple of days, everything is going to turn around, if not exponentially, at least incrementally.
     I believe that.
     I have to believe that.

And in the story’s final scene, Ari’s transformation from a boy believing that luck will save him to a boy believing in himself and his own skills is complete.

When his brother returns from fighting fires to watch Ari’s semi-final game for the championship and gives the pep talk before the players take the field, he says: “So then, I don’t have to tell you, soccer is a game of timing and skill. But it also a game of—”

And Ari interrupts: 

“I don’t want to be disrespectful, but we have worked hard. We play together. We are about to slaughter Plainfield/Montrose. I think we know the truth about soccer. At least, we know how to play like a team.”

No longer does he need his lucky card or his lucky presidents. He has everything that he needs. His parents on the sidelines. His brother. His friends. His team.

He knows now, thanks to Aronson's deft craftsmanship, what he didn’t know at the start of the story: That’s all the luck he needs.

For more about Sarah Aronson and her work, visit her website: http://www.saraharonson.com

And for more about Beyond Lucky, visit:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8037-3520-0

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9260588-beyond-lucky