Appreciation: MY HAIR IS A BOOK by Maisha Oso
Today I want to give a shout out to my friend Maisha Oso. I met Maisha in the Picture Book Rising Stars program where we were both mentor for the class of 2023. I became a fan of Maisha’s BUSTER THE BULLY and asked Maisha if she’d be willing to write a short piece for my DONUTS FOR EVERYBODY project. Maisha agreed and wrote a PERFECT poem that holds a special place in my book. I was already grateful for her contribution, but in recent months I’ve come to realize how generous Maisha was because the poem she wrote for me must have been composed while juggling of a number of other projects. How do I know? Because Maisha is out here knocking book after book out of the park.
BEFORE THE SHIPS came out last year and immediately found its place on several “Best of” lists. A quick side note: there are a lot of people out there who are really good at writing book reviews, I’m not sure I’m one of them. I can get lost in the weeds when I’m digging into a book and I tend to overthink my response. In this case, though, I knew what I wanted to say:
Maisha’s other 2024 release was MY HAIR IS A BOOK. It, too, found its place on Best of lists (the one I’m most jealous of is the New York Public Library’s) and on my desk.
I’m thinking my way through the review I want to write for MY HAIR IS A BOOK and the one word that keeps coming to mind is BOLD. The writing has a lot of wordplay, and I don’t mean yok-yok punny wordplay, I mean things like double meanings. The title itself tells the analogy at play, MY HAIR IS A BOOK, but within that is the idea that each strand is a story, each twist an event, and each braid a memory. (That last bit brought to mind an animated short, LADY WITH LONG HAIR by Barbara Bakos which is a whole different kind of story and storytelling, but it was nice to be reminded of it.)
There is, too, some amount of joyous wordplay (pick it/picket) and in-jokes (undefeated!) that reads so naturally. None of it is corny (see, I was almost tempted to write “corn-row-y” which is terrible and which proves Maisha is way better at this than I’d ever be) and the rhythm of the entire book is such that even a half-bald goofball who almost said “corn-row-y” can sound good reading it.
But most of all, MOST of all, what I love about MY HAIR IS A BOOK is that the writing was so clearly in Maisha’s voice that it reminded me of the poem she gave me for DONUTS and how lucky I am to count Maisha as a friend and that made me happy.
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