Review: "Mia and Friends" by Karlin Gray, illustrated by Micheline Hess

Mia and Friends by Karlin Gray, illustrated by Micheline Hess
Published August 2024 via First Second
★★★

Mm. So this is a middle-grade-or-younger graphic biography of Mia Hamm. I was so pleased to see that this was coming out, because Mia Hamm was my first-ever hero—the 1999 Women's World Cup was quite literally the only television I ever watched at home (we very occasionally rented a videotape to watch a movie, but by very occasionally I mean maybe twice a year; the television was stored in my parents' bedroom closet, and other than the World Cup I have no memories of watching any scheduled programming on it) as a child, which maybe tells you something about my family. I had copies of Go for the Goal and The Game and the Glory because that was the sort of thing we did and frankly still do—went looking for books about things and people that interested us. So, you know. Here we are.

I expect this will be a good one for young readers who are interested in soccer and who don't know that much about this earlier generation of soccer players. Most of the sources (and we stan a book with sources) are from the late 90s or early 2000s, which means that there's little in here that I didn't learn as a child reading obsessively about soccer. I think part of that is that that generation of players did not have the same level of celebrity that today's players do (something that the book discusses somewhat), and consequently there was less self-promotion and fewer memoirs and less direct-from source information. But...I would have loved to see some new information, or something that I wouldn't have seen in a book written in 2001—even a casual mention of a queer player would have felt more up to date (some of the players of that generation were out even then, but it wasn't discussed in most media). Or possibly something about Michelle Akers' chronic fatigue syndrome—that wouldn't be new, but it might feel especially relevant in the context of, e.g., long COVID.

So not really the book for me, but then, I'm really not the target audience here.