In 2014, I began work on a middle-grade fiction book, my first. Gabby Garcia’s Ultimate Playbook is about a Latinx 7th grader who — after her school closes partway through her best baseball season ever — starts handling life’s challenges by approaching them like an athlete. She needs a play. Or, a playbook. As Gabby puts it: “Playbooks are about goals and actions and results. Deciding to do A in order to achieve B so the world can C how awesome you are. Haha.”
It’s upbeat, positive, often-comic (I hope) stuff. When I wrote it, Barack Obama was our president, and though we all knew America had a lot of work to do still, he had ushered in more hope than I’d felt ever before in my adult life.
My book was published in 2017. Things now are… different… than they were in 2014.
I’ll be the first to say that my book — aimed at kids ages 8 to 12 — doesn’t begin to touch on the issues we’re facing. And I won’t bog this essay down with them, but I know State of the Woman addresses all the work we need to do regularly. Gabby Garcia’s Ultimate Playbook is lighthearted, and I hope thoughtful, about the hurdles many kids face trying to figure out how to be a person in the world (to borrow a phrase from the title of Heather Havrilesky’s must-read advice tome).
But, what I still love about it is, Gabby is not necessarily a typical female heroine. I mean, when she gets to her new school, she full-on expects that her new classmates, and especially the baseball team, should be THRILLED that a golden child (her old coach’s name for her) has arrived to be the star pitcher. If only we could all have such confidence, right?
“Do you ever get mad at Gabby?” a reader recently asked during a Skype session with a library.
“Yes!” I said. “Just like I get mad at myself. But in different ways.”
Gabby is different from me. While I certainly can be confident, I’m plagued with the kind of self-doubts and second-guessing that seem part and parcel of writing life. Often, pulling back from a thing because I’m worried about not getting it right is the stuff that makes me mad at me. But Gabby is sure of herself to the point of being, at times, cocky. The reader who asked if I got mad at Gabby was alluding to this sometimes deluded sense of self. But Gabby is correct about how good she is at baseball. There is no field she doesn’t feel she belongs on. She quite honestly kicks ass. And, when I wrote the book, I put her in a sort-of utopian setting where the hard time Gabby gets from one of her worst rivals, Mario Salamida, has nothing to do with the fact she’s a girl pitching against a boy. Nope, he’s just mad that he’s never gotten a hit off of her.
Underlying that earned confidence of hers, however, Gabby realizes that when things don’t go her way, her nervousness and anxiety begin to surface. And while at first she assumes she should always be regarded as a winner, over the course of the book, I try to make her face the moments when she feels a bit like a loser (even if she never uses that word).
I’ve seen a few reviews from readers who didn’t like Gabby. Believe it or not, I was pleased. If I’d written a male character who was full of himself, the same thing could have happened, but it would be a given that he’s overconfident and his failings due to that “ballsiness” (why we equate brazen surety with testicles, I’ll never know) would be accepted. If a boy learned to step back and see where he came out with too much swagger, readers would likely praise him. And while I love books where a girl learns to feel empowered and realizes own her strength over the course of the story, Gabby was my aim at something different: She opens the book feeling (and it’s not in the middle-grade realm to use this phrase) like the shit. Readers knocked her a few times just for having swagger from the get-go. I wouldn’t change a thing.
I’m proud to have written about a woman, or in this case a 12-year-old girl, who’s able to misstep not because she’s too reserved or too reticent or too nervous but because at times she’s too sure. Good for her.
In writing about this book at this time, I’d be remiss not to address the also the somewhat fraught issue of cultural appropriation. Gabby is a Latinx girl living in Georgia. Even three years ago, when I was penning my first draft, I knew that I couldn’t write with accuracy about the Latinx experience in America. I still can’t. There are writers who can, and I’m honored to have shared places on lists of middle-grade books with Latinx main characters. But, before Gabby, I’d written books featuring plenty of characters who looked like me (I was a ghostwriter before I began releasing work under my own name, and I’ll just say it, there were plenty of white kids): If my book was ultimately a positive story about figuring out how to be your best self, it should be able to be about everyone and anyone. So why not a Gabby Garcia? I made sure not to make the novel focus on a topic that I couldn’t imagine in the skin I’m in now: you won’t see challenges around immigration or culture or enduring racism crop up. However, I did make Gabby and her friends as multicultural as possible. A reader asked me about my decision to make Gabby and her BFF, Diego Parker, Latino and her new friend Katy Harris Black.
Truly, a big reason why is it reflects the reality I know from my son’s school here in L.A., and the reality I think we can and should get to. In my pages, I wanted every kid to see someone who looked like them and who was succeeding. Gabby at one point joins her new school’s talent squad — kids who are experts at chemistry and skateboarding and magic and oration. Her new friend group is a veritable United Nations of faces and names. Katy Harris, who Gabby and everyone else admires, earns the nickname Baby Beyoncé from Gabby, and it’s not just because she writes her own songs and has the best dance moves: She’s possessed of that star-quality “something” and she’s kind to boot. I didn’t get into how Katy got to that place — it’s not my story to tell — but, yes, I wanted it to be a given that of course she would be there. And, if in writing these diverse kids, I got something wrong, I hope readers will let me know. Writing to me isn’t solely about constantly creating but also constantly learning, even if it means owning my mistakes.
Ultimately, though, the story I told is one of an individual character’s — a future woman’s — arrival at bigger self-knowledge, with a lot of comical missteps along the way. She takes all these steps in a landscape where kids of different backgrounds live fairly harmoniously (and equally across genders and races) — each one empowered to chase down their dreams. It does, at current, feel a bit like a fantasy but I want to get to a place where our next generation can take for granted — through a lot of work, I know — that such a landscape is their reality.
Iva-Marie Palmer is the author of the middle-grade series Gabby Garcia’s Ultimate Playbook (with illustrator Marta Kissi) and several young adult books, including The End of the World As We Know It and Romeo, Juliet, and Jim (with Larry Schwarz). She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two sons. Find her online at ivamariepalmer.com and Twitter and Instagram.
