Becoming: Adapted for Young Readers

In Becoming, Michelle Obama takes readers from her childhood in Chicago all the way to her last days in the White House. Michelle Robinson grew up in a working class neighborhood sharing a room with her older brother, Craig. Her father worked tending a boiler (even after he became disabled with MS) and both her parents empowered their children to dream big dreams. A gifted student, she followed her brother to Princeton, which was very White and very male. After Harvard Law School, she went home to Chicago and a job at a "fancy" law firm, where she was asked to mentor a summer intern named Barack Obama. She would leave the law firm for a job at City Hall and then one with a startup that trained and mentored young people. The Obamas began married life in the apartment she grew up in, had two daughters, and started what Michelle Obama thought would be a life in Chicago surrounded by family and friends. That, of course, was not what the future held. There would be campaigns for state senator, U.S. senator, and finally for president. The chapters on life in the White House focus on family rather than politics. She shares lots of stories about what the family did to make life as normal as possible while being accompanied everywhere by the Secret Service (nightly family dinners, sleepovers and parties for Sasha and Malia's friends, shopping incognito at Target, making certain they were at school basketball games and swim meets, arranging driving lessons for Malia). Obama ends her story looking forward, writing that "becoming is never giving up on the idea that there's more growing to be done."