Voice of Her Own: Becoming Emily Dickinson »

Author, playwright, and actor Barbara Dana spent over a decade researching Emily Dickinson for this book. Her award-winning books for children include Zucchini and Young Joan, a novel based on the girlhood of Joan of Arc. She is also the coeditor of Wider Than the Sky: Essays and Meditations on the Healing Power of Emily Dickinson for adults. Ms. Dana has three grown sons. She lives in South Salem, New York, with her yellow lab, Riley.

When something is most important to me and I do not want to lose it, I gather it into a poem. It is said that women must employ the needle and not the pen. But I will be a Poet! That's who I am!

Before she was an iconic American poet, Emily Dickinson was a spirited girl eager to find her place in the world. Expected by family and friends to mold to the prescribed role for women in mid-1800s New England, Emily was challenged to define herself on her own terms.

Award-winning author Barbara Dana brilliantly imagines the girlhood of this extraordinary young woman, capturing the cadences of her unique voice and bringing her to radiant life.

VOYA

Before she was one of the great American poets, Emily Dickinson was a lively, bright, conflicted girl, caught between the impulse to be true to her Self (as she capitalized it) and her duties to her family, especially her demanding father. Dana leads readers through Dickinson's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, up to her decision to plight her troth to poetry rather than to any of the handsome Whiskers (her term for young men) of her acquaintance. The author makes the bold choice of handing the narration over to Emily herself, with authentic-sounding results. Although Emily's concerns over her place in the world, intense but often dissatisfying relationships with friends and family members, and bouts with both mental and physical illness are fully grounded in her mid-nineteenth-century New England milieu, they are also universal and relatable for modern teen readers. Several of Dickinson's own phrases appear in her open-hearted diary entries; these are cited in the Author's Notes section of the book. As accomplished a facsimile of Dickinson's voice as this book provides, however, it is neither as appealing nor as believable as the kaleidoscopic view of Sylvia Plath created in Stephanie Hemphill's Your Own, Sylvia (Random House, 2007/VOYA April 2007). This shortcoming is primarily because it imagines what Dickinson herself would have said and thought, creating an odd redundancy. Readers know what Dickinson thought about many things, thanks to the vast correspondence she left behind. Surely her letters would reveal with more clarity her crackling wit and fierce intellect. Reviewer: Sophie Brookover