Play Like a Girl

July 1, 2017
Some stories of sports-as-uplift end with last-second goals that win championships; this one focuses on the humbler but far more vital goals of food, education, and dignity. Troubled by the unfair lot of women in the Nairobi slum of Kibera, lifelong resident Abdul Kassim founded a soccer team (in 2002), and then a school (Kibera Girls Soccer Academy, in 2006), with the barest resources imaginablebut to the young women students, who faced hardship utterly beyond the experience of American readers, the borrowed room and inexperienced teachers were a lifeline. Since its humble beginnings, the school has had constant growing pains, from ever-present resource shortages to conflict over the use of corporal punishment, but has persevered to offer vital tools to students who otherwise face early marriage, prostitution, and other dead-end fates. Readers should know this is much more about the school than the soccer team, and, while Roscher is an earnest chronicler of the students' heartbreaking tales, the writing fails to cohere into a compelling, book-length narrative. Still, it's an important story that should be heard.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)