You Are Awesome: An Honest Review From a Mom of a Reader

The first thing you should know about You Are Awesome is that my ten year old read it without being asked. That almost never happens here. I bought it in June 2026 for one narrow reason, which I will get to, and I assumed it would sit on a shelf the way most books I buy with good intentions sit on a shelf. Instead it went into his backpack. Five months later it is still in there, pressed against a folder and a half empty water bottle, and he still opens it. So this is not a review that pretends a book changed my kid. It is an honest account of what the book by Matthew Syed did in our house, and the parts of it that did not work.

I am Lorna Beckett. I work part time at the front desk of a dental office in Dayton, Ohio. I am a mom, not a teacher, not a librarian, and not anybody who should be giving advice about your child. Take this as one household's experience. My son Eli is ten and in fifth grade, and he is the reader in this story. My daughter Nora is six and has never touched this book, which matters, because a lot of what gets written about books like this blurs together what works for a nine year old and what works for a kindergartner. Those are different jobs and they need different books.

What You Are Awesome Actually Is

The listing facts first, because they tell you more than most reviews do. It is published by Sourcebooks Explore, released in July 2019, and aimed at readers 9 to 12, grades 4 to 6. It runs 160 pages and measures 6.25 by 0.65 by 8.75 inches. It weighs 1.1 pounds, so it is a real book in the hand and not a thin thing a child finishes before you reach the end of the driveway. Matthew Syed wrote it. He is a former Olympic table tennis player and the book's whole case comes out of that experience: that skill is built by repetition and by making mistakes, and that it is not handed out at birth as talent. Toby Triumph did the illustrations. It is part of a series with the same name.

That is the factual picture. Here is the more useful one. This is not a story. There is no character to follow and no plot to fall into. It talks to the reader directly, argues a case, and then hands the reader things to do. Some of those interactive parts are pages to write on and some are quiz-style pages, and my son skipped a good number of them. I will come back to that, because it is the most honest thing I can tell you about how an actual ten year old uses a book like this.

I also want to say what it is not, because the cover and the title suggest something softer than what is inside. It is not a book that tells a child they are wonderful. There is nothing wrong with books that do that, and I own one. But if you are looking for something warm and reassuring to read at bedtime, this is the wrong purchase and you will be disappointed by page twenty.

Why It Ended Up in His Backpack

The reason I bought it is specific. In the fall of fourth grade, Eli stopped raising his hand in math. Not all at once and not dramatically. He simply quit volunteering. I asked him about it once, got a shrug, and let it go for a while because I did not want to make it bigger than it was. What I eventually got out of him was that he had done badly on one fractions quiz and had quietly decided he was not a math person. One quiz. That was the entire evidence.

I had already been down a version of this road with his sister. Nora went through a stretch in kindergarten of announcing she could not do things before she had tried them, and short picture books read aloud worked for her. I will write about those separately. Eli is past picture books. He rolls his eyes at them, and honestly he is right to, because he is ten and he can tell when something was made for a smaller kid. What I needed was something he would read himself, at his own pace, without me standing over him looking encouraging.

You Are Awesome was the one that fit that description, and it was the only one of the five books I have bought for this purpose that fit it. I bought one copy in June 2026. It was not a gift and nobody recommended it to me. He started it on the drive to his grandmother's in Columbus, which is about an hour and ten minutes, and he read it in pieces across the summer and finished it by the end of July.

After a rough math test in September he said, on his own, that he needed more practice. Not that he was bad at math. That sentence is the entire return on this book.

The Part Nobody Mentions: It Is a Book About Practice, Not About Feelings

Most of the confidence books I flipped through are really about feelings. They tell a child they are wonderful, they are enough, they are loved. That is a good message and it has its place. You Are Awesome does something different and less comfortable. It argues a mechanism. It says the gap between people who are good at a thing and people who are not is mostly hours and repetitions, and that mistakes are part of the mechanism rather than proof that you should stop.

For Eli that framing landed where reassurance would have bounced off. If I tell him he is good at math, he hears a mom being nice, and he discounts it immediately. An argument is something he can weigh. The idea that being bad at the start is the normal first state and not a verdict is the kind of thing a ten year old boy will actually accept, because it does not ask him to feel anything. It just asks him to notice that practice is boring and repetitive and that everyone does it.

That is also the limitation, and it is a real one. If your child's trouble is emotional, if they are being unkind to themselves in a way that has nothing to do with a specific skill, this book will not reach them. It is aimed at the kid who has decided they are bad at a subject. It is not about sadness, or friendship, or being kind to other people, and it does not pretend to be.

The Sections That Feel Like a Lecture

Syed is persuasive, and persuasive is not the same as fun. There are stretches where an adult voice is explaining something at length, and Eli felt every one of them. He told me, without my asking, that some parts were boring. He is a strong reader for his grade and he still skipped the quiz-style pages. I think that is the common outcome. A kid who is already half convinced does not want to be tested on it.

I decided not to fight him about it. My rule with this book was that he reads what he wants and skips what he wants, because the moment it becomes assigned reading it becomes homework, and homework was the thing we were trying to get away from. If you are a parent who needs every page completed and every prompt filled in, you and your child are going to have a worse time with this than we did, and it will not be the book's fault.

It is also worth saying plainly that the author's own story is sport. That gives the argument a lot of weight and it also means many of the examples come from a world my son does not live in. Eli does not play a competitive sport, is not chasing a ranking, and had a bad fractions quiz. He still found the argument usable, which I count in the book's favor, but you should know before you buy that the credibility being borrowed here is athletic.

What Actually Changed, Five Months In

I will be careful here, because this is exactly where reviews of this kind of book go wrong. In September 2026 Eli brought home a rough math test. I did not say anything clever and I did not remind him about the book. He came to me later and said, on his own, that he needed more practice. Not that he was bad at math. Not that the test was unfair. That he needed more practice.

That is a small thing and I am not going to dress it up. No grade came up. Nothing was transformed. His hand still does not go up every day in math and he still has weeks where he would rather do anything else. What shifted is the story he tells himself about a bad result, and after a year of watching him quietly conclude he was not a math person, the story is the thing I actually wanted to move.

The other detail that surprised me is that he goes back to it. The book lives in his backpack or on his desk, and every few weeks I catch him in it again. Books that get finished once and never reopened are the normal case in this house. This one gets reopened in pieces, which tells me the argument is still doing some work in his head when nobody is watching.

The Reading Level Question

The listing says 9 to 12 and grades 4 to 6, and I think that is accurate. Eli was ten and heading into fifth grade when he started, and it fit him. The vocabulary did not slow him down and the length did not intimidate him. What I would not do is hand it to a seven year old who reads two grades above level and expect the same result, because reading level is not the only bar here. The idea of practice over talent asks a kid to have some distance from their own frustration, and that is not a reading skill. It is an age thing.

Nora has never touched this book and I have not offered it to her. She is six. It would be a lecture to her, and she already has picture books that do a job this book cannot do, so there is no gap to fill. That is not a knock on You Are Awesome. It is just the stated age range being the right one.

Who This Is For

This is for the parent of a kid roughly nine to twelve who has decided they are bad at something specific and has quietly stopped trying. The kid who quit raising their hand. The kid who says they are not a math person, or not a reader, or not a sport person, usually on the strength of one bad afternoon. If your child will read a book on their own, and especially if they will accept an argument more readily than a compliment, this is the most useful thing I have found for that job.

It is also for the parent willing to let the child read it their own way. Skipped pages are fine. Skipped quizzes are fine. It works as an argument that gets absorbed in pieces, and it does not need to be completed like an assignment.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your child is under nine, or if your child is a reluctant reader who needs a story to stay inside a book. There is no plot here, and a kid who reads for plot will put it down. Skip it if what you want is a feelings book, something that tells a child they are loved and enough exactly as they are. That need is real and there are good books for it, but this is a different book doing a different job, and buying the wrong one is how you end up with a shelf full of unread good intentions.

And skip it if you are picturing a book you read aloud together at bedtime. This is not that. My son read it alone, in the car and in his room, and the two times I tried to talk with him about it he tolerated me for about a minute each. Some books are built for company. This one is built for a kid and his own thoughts.

One more thing, and I mean it. If a child is struggling with something bigger than a subject, a book is not the tool. I answer phones at a dental office. I am not a counselor and I am not qualified to tell anyone otherwise, and I would not hand this to a kid in real distress and call the matter handled.