The Mistakes that Made Us: Confessions from Twenty Poets

Gr 3-8–An engaging, emotionally honest collection of poetry that offers children a comforting glimpse of adults and their imperfections. Latham and Waters center their work on a timeless piece of advice: It’s OK to make mistakes. This gentle stance serves as the jumping-off point for the themes of the book’s four sections on embarrassing blunders, deliberate actions gone awry, missteps that lead to good fortune, and accidents that hurt others. The twenty writers depict real moments from their childhood, with annotations providing context and further reflection. Poems often employ clever visual devices to enhance their impact. For instance, George Ella Lyon’s “Dare” sets the word “JUMPED!” vertically on the page, with each letter (and the exclamation point) spilling downward onto a new line. López’s expressive art, a combination of acrylic, graphite, ink, and digital technique, gets in on the act as the letters of Linda Sue Park’s “Matter I Alls” become a breakaway floor to illustrate the paraphrased biblical proverb “Pride goeth before a fall.” Other illustrations foreground the kinetic energy of the poets’ young selves, with bright red lines representing scissor cut marks, shouts of anger, and baseball physics calculations. Certain entries feature questionable examples of mistakes, such as Tabatha Yeatts’s account of slacking off during rehearsal for a play in summer camp—only to nail her delivery on opening night—and Jorge Argueta’s glorious, consequence-free afternoon skipping school with a friend. Then again, perhaps this is Latham and Waters’ point: mistakes can be beautiful and, like beauty, lie in the eye of the beholder.