Review: "Flipping Forward Twisting Backward" by Alma Fullerton

Flipping Forward Twisting Backward by Alma Fullerton
Published July 2022 via Peachtree
★★★

In the gym, Claire is an A+ student: gymnastics is intuitive to her, and she's determined to be the best she can be. In the classroom, though, things are different: no matter how hard she tries, letters don't make sense to her. And with her mother unwilling to accept that Claire might have a learning disability, she's at risk of losing gymnastics if she can't get her grades up.

This is a thoughtful, quick read. It's quite sad to me that Claire's mother—who is a doctor and frankly should know better—is so unwilling to accept that Claire might learn differently than your average kid, but I wouldn't be surprised if this, well, weren't really surprising. (I do wish Claire's teachers had tried a bit harder to neutrally convince Claire's mother of the usefulness of testing? Pointing out that if she didn't have a learning disability, the testing would show that too, and if she did have a learning disability, they'd be able to get her the resources to get her on track. But to be fair, I don't know if that would have helped!)

The book is in verse, which is generally not my favourite (and is not my favourite here). I don't think the verse is adding that much to the story—I prefer stories in verse when they're using the structure to push the story, or to do something playful that you can't really do in prose; here, though the verse allows for more space on the page and shorter sentences, there's not a ton of innovation to the structure. That being said, I am not the target audience for this, and if the short verse structure makes this easier for kids who had dyslexia to read (not my area of expertise, so I can't speak to that), then I'm all for it.