By Lesa Cline-Ransome
The true story of two sisters from Compton who got up before the sun six days a week and ended up owning tennis.
Before the trophies, Venus and Serena Williams were two little girls on public courts in Compton, up before sunrise six days a week, hitting serve after serve after serve while their father coached and their mother kept score. Venus turned professional at fourteen. Serena followed three years later. Plenty of people cheered. Plenty of others, unhappy to see two Black girls winning in a sport that had been almost entirely white, booed them and shouted things at them from the stands. They kept winning anyway. And underneath the whole story is the sisters themselves, best friends and fiercest rivals, with Serena always one step behind Venus until the day she wasn't. James E. Ransome's paintings are full of color and speed and the actual tension of a rally.
Sports-mad children mostly meet Venus and Serena as finished legends, and this book shows them as two girls doing drills in the dark on a cracked public court. That's the part that sticks. It's honest about the work, and it's honest about what got thrown at them, which makes the winning mean something instead of just happening. It also does the sister thing beautifully: they're each other's favorite person and each other's biggest obstacle, which any child with a sibling will recognize instantly. Short enough for one sitting, and the paintings will pull in a child who thinks they don't like biographies.