Book Review: My Thirteenth Winter

I just finished reading My Thirteenth Winter: A Memoir by Samantha Abeel. It's the autobiography of a young woman who learned about a math-related learning disability when she was in junior high. In the meantime, she demonstrated an extraordinary gift for the English language and for writing poetry, even to the point where she published a book of poetry when she was only 15. The memoir's main topic is how both her disability and her talent intermingled to make her who she is today.

Both my library and the publisher classified this memoir as a "juvenile" book, but adults interested in reading a moving autobiography or learning about this little-understood learning disability shouldn't let its classification deter them. When I realized what part of the library I would have to visit to check this book out, I feared that it would be filled with childish thoughts and "dumbed down" language, as I've seen in some YA mass-market fiction. But my fears were unfounded. Abeel writes a very mature review of the events of her childhood, looks ahead to imagine how her differences will continue to shape her future, and in general brings her talent for poetry into the prose of her memoir. Any fan of literary fiction or poetry will appreciate her words, and anyone who has struggled with a subject in school will appreciate her subject matter.

This autobiography was a quick read, but the formatting threw me off every once-in-a-while. The text bounces back and forth between the usual memoir type of prose, and more diary-like entries. The two styles are set apart by different type faces, and the diary entries did give me a better sense of what she was thinking as she experienced these events, but it seemed to me that the message of the diary entries could have been better meshed with the prose and the back-and-forth could have been eliminated. Still, it wasn't an unpleasant read.