Queen of the Track

Gr 2–5—Coachman, the first African American woman to win an Olympic gold medal, was born in poverty in Georgia in 1922. She always loved to run and jump and would sneak off to do it even when it meant punishment. Lang brings her subject's early years to life through small details, like the fact that she ran so fast that she was able to deliver still-hot meals as a rescue worker in the aftermath of a 1940 tornado, and the difficulties of traveling to meets and events during segregation. The bulk of the story, though, focuses on Coachman's Olympic dreams, which were put on hold during World War II, when the games were canceled twice. Finally, in 1948, she traveled to war-weary London to compete and narrowly defeated her toughest opponent with a record-setting high jump. Cooper's pastels keep to a brown, grainy palette, recalling the Georgia dirt on which the track star ran as a child. While this book is a fine, if talky, introduction to an inspiring athlete, Ann Malespina's Touch the Sky: Alice Coachman, Olympic High Jumper (Albert Whitman, 2011), with its vivid prose-poem text and glowing oils by Eric Velasquez, might have more immediate appeal.—Kathleen Kelly MacMillan, Carroll County Public Library, MD