collected
Nonfiction · Children's · Biography & Memoir · Biography and memoir
About 45 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 2 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Jazz Jennings recalls knowing she was a girl from early childhood, although her family initially understood her as a boy. She introduces her friends and favorite activities, including dressing as a mermaid, and describes how unhappy she felt wearing boys’ clothes. Her parents seek a doctor’s help to understand what she has been telling them and learn the word transgender.
Told in a simple first-person voice alongside watercolor illustrations, the autobiographical picture book offers an introduction to transgender identity for young children. Its explanation stays close to Jazz’s everyday experiences and feelings, keeping the language concrete and the tone reassuring.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Young children being introduced to transgender identity. The autobiographical picture book uses a simple first-person voice and watercolor illustrations, grounding its explanation in Jazz’s everyday experiences, activities, and feelings.
Yes, the explanation follows Jazz’s experience of knowing she was a girl while her family initially understood her as a boy. Concrete details, including her unhappiness wearing boys’ clothes, keep the introduction close to a child’s daily life.
Not really, the tone stays warm and reassuring, even when Jazz describes feeling unhappy in boys’ clothes. Her friends, favorite activities, and parents’ efforts to understand her give the account a hopeful focus on identity, family, and belonging.
32 pages in the Dial Books 2014 hardcover edition.
Dial Books · 2014 · Hardcover. ISBN 9780803741072.
About 45 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 32-page Dial Books edition. Dense books can take longer.
Jessica Herthel is an American children’s author and a consultant on LGBTQ-inclusive education. Her professional work has included serving as education director of the Stonewall National Museum and Archives, advising Broward County Public Schools on curriculum, editing an LGBTQ handbook for school administrators, and leading her local PFLAG chapter. She co-wrote I Am Jazz with Jazz Jennings. Written in direct, conversational prose, the picture book centers Jennings’s childhood account of knowing she was a girl and follows her family as they seek medical guidance and learn that she is transgender.
Jazz Jennings is an American media personality and LGBT rights activist whose writing draws on her experience growing up transgender in public. Her work uses a direct, conversational first-person voice to explain identity through the particulars of childhood, family, school, friendship, and public scrutiny. Co-written with Jessica Herthel, the illustrated picture book I Am Jazz centers a child’s early certainty about who she is and follows her family as they seek understanding and guidance. The memoir Being Jazz widens that account into a coming-of-age narrative, moving between ordinary adolescent experiences and reflections on the responsibilities and pressures of speaking publicly.
