“It seems so stupid when I look back on it now, how much I wanted to be part of the in-crowd. You know what? Screw the in-crowd. Trying so hard to be like everyone else, to be someone you’re not, is exhausting and self-destructive….Every voice matters, and being different is a good thing. Who wants to be the same as everybody else?” -Brittney Griner

That is a quote from Brittney Griner: A famous WNBA player. She plays center for the Phoenix Mecury and was the No. 1 draft pick for the 2013 WNBA Draft. She is six foot eight and wears a size 17 men’s shoe. In this book she expresses issues of gender, sexuality, body image, and self esteem.

A theme for this book would be, be yourself and not anyone else. Brittney Griner gives a message on how you can do anything that you set your mind to. At, first she never even thought she would have a career with basketball. But, in high school that all changed.

In this book she talks about many things. She talks about her childhood, growing up, basketball, and the many people that influenced her in her life. It also talked about how it felt for her to win her last game playing with the Baylor Bears. It also talked about her love for her dad Ray and her coach from Baylor Kim Mulkey. Although, she had some mixed feelings about Baylor because of their policy against homosexuality, she really enjoyed being coached by Kim.

I felt really good about reading this book. I loved Britney Griner since she started playing basketball at Baylor. What really caught my eye, was her ability to dunk, you rarely see girls that can dunk in college. I liked reading this because it made me learn more about her and want to play like her when I get older. Brittney Griner is definitely one of my favorite female basketball players and a person I wish to meet in my lifetime.

I would recommend this book to anyone of Brittney Griner’s fans. I would also recommend it to any young female that wants to play basketball in the future, and see what obstacles it took for a successful female basketball player to make it to the WNBA. Usually, people think that men are better than females but, Brittney Griner proves that theory to be totally wrong.

This autobiography by Brittney Griner is interesting after the first couple of chapters about her childhood and middle school days which were rather repetitious. The focus of the book is on Brittney’s efforts to be true to herself. She realized relatively early in life that she was a lesbian, and her autobiography centers on her struggles to live that lifestyle. She particularly struggled with two people who had a direct influence on her life: her father who strongly disapproved of gays and kicked her out of his house during part of her high school years, and later her coach, Kim Mulkey, at Baylor University, an anti-gay institution. ( )