Quick Take
- Performance: Imani Parks is credited for the whole first-person memoir, so the voice you hear is not the voice that lived it
- What it covers: foster care to the Olympic team, faith and family as ballast, a career set down on paper at nineteen
- Feel: bright and direct, pitched at readers younger than its subject
- Our call: an honest early-career memoir, best taken as the story of a childhood rather than of a career
An autobiography written in the first person and delivered by somebody else: that is the arrangement on this audiobook, and it is the first thing worth understanding about it. Simone Biles is the author. Imani Parks is the narrator. Every I across six hours and twenty-one minutes belongs to one of those names and every syllable of it belongs to the other. Nothing on this page indicates whether Biles stepped into a booth at any point, which for an official autobiography is a strange thing to be left guessing about. Everything else on this listing is secondary to that one line in the credit block.
Simone Biles traces the whole improbable thing back to a field trip. That is where the description starts: a hometown in Spring, Texas, a school outing, and a talent it credits partly to God and partly to a refusal to be stopped by anything. From there the arc runs through an early childhood in foster care, through the household that became her family, to a coveted spot on the U.S. Olympic team, the national spotlight during the Games, and twenty-five World Championship medals. Faith and family are named repeatedly as the ballast. The promised extras are behind-the-scenes passages on what gymnastics events, including the Olympics, actually look like from inside.
Kindle Customer supplies the most useful qualification anywhere in this column, and it is not a criticism so much as a calibration. Biles was nineteen when the memoir was written, and that shows in both tone and content. The book goes deep on the younger years, spending real time on how she came to live with her parents and how the relationships with her siblings changed, which is exactly what a nineteen-year-old can recall in detail. Read as the story of a childhood it is unusually complete. Read as the story of a career it stops early by necessity. Another response, arriving from a self-described non-reader of biographies, lands on the same quality from the opposite direction: plenty of humor, lessons buried inside the anecdotes, and an author who lists what she has won without ever sounding as though she is boasting about it.
Why Listen to Courage to Soar
Imani Parks carries the entire memoir, and hiring a reader for a first-person sports book is a routine publishing decision with a distinctly non-routine effect. Part of what a listener comes to an athlete's autobiography for is the sound of the person who lived it: the pauses in the wrong places, the accent, the way somebody says the name of the coach who broke them. This recording offers an interpreter instead, and the record does not present that as a compromise or explain it at all. Younger listeners who know the voice from broadcast coverage will register the substitution immediately.
Gymnastics readers should also note where the book stops. It was issued in November 2016, so the account closes where that date puts it, and everything in the sport that came afterward sits outside the covers entirely. That is not a flaw, but it does reshape what you are buying: an early-career memoir written at the top of a first Olympic cycle, rather than a retrospective. Anyone arriving with later events in mind will find the book has no idea they are coming. Years later, that innocence is arguably the most interesting thing about it: a young athlete describing a career she assumes will simply keep going, with none of the retrospective framing a later edition would inevitably have imposed on the same material.
What to Watch For in Courage to Soar
Zonderkidz issued it, and the imprint explains the register better than any review could. The description advertises a positive role model for young girls, an ideal gift for birthdays or holidays, and a book that is perfect for school assignments and reports. That last item is worth pausing on: a memoir marketed partly as homework material. It sets expectations correctly for the prose, which the responses describe as engaging and fast-paced rather than searching, and it accounts for a structure that keeps handing the reader a lesson at the end of a chapter. None of that is a criticism of a book doing exactly what its imprint intended, but an adult expecting a candid sports memoir should recalibrate before pressing play.
Five written responses sit beneath a counter recording two ratings. The column outnumbers the tally that is supposed to contain it, which means the 4.7 average shown here is being computed from a pool this page never displays. Whatever the explanation, the practical consequence is straightforward: the badge is not a summary of the five accounts you can read, and those five accounts are not a sample of the badge. Use the written material and leave the number alone.
Spring, Texas is where the story begins, and printed artifacts are where the column keeps ending up. The description itself promotes an eight-page full-color photo insert, which a recording cannot carry in any form. One five-star response consists almost entirely of a complaint that the poster was missing. Another observes that the print runs large, roughly size fourteen, which makes it quick and easy to get through. Three of the five people who wrote something are describing a physical object rather than a listening experience, and none of them mentions a voice.
The Right Listener for Courage to Soar
Young gymnasts are the obvious audience, named as such in the copy without embarrassment, but the book travels further than that. A child in foster care, or one being raised by grandparents, will find the domestic part of this story doing more work than the medals do, and one response reports a daughter simply loving it. Adults who watch the sport every four years and want the human architecture behind a routine will get that too, delivered in six hours and without technical jargon.
Gymnasts and readers who want the later chapters of this career will not find them, since the book closes in 2016 and cannot reach past that. Anyone whose main reason for choosing audio is to hear an athlete speak in her own voice should also weigh the credit block carefully before committing. The writing itself is warm, self-aware about its own youth, and generous about the people who made the career possible. Hearing it read by somebody else is the compromise, and for most young listeners it will be an easy one to accept.
Questions Listeners Ask
Does Simone Biles read the audiobook herself?
No. Imani Parks is credited as narrator, so the first-person account reaches you in another voice from beginning to end. The listing gives no indication that the author recorded any part of it, not even an introduction, which is worth knowing if hearing the athlete speak was your main reason for choosing the audio format.
What age group is this audiobook written for?
The publisher is a children's imprint, and the description pitches the book as a role model story for young girls, a gift item, and source material for school assignments. Practically that means upper elementary through middle school, though the foster care and family passages carry enough weight for older teenagers too.
Why does the ratings display look inconsistent?
Because the counter reports two ratings while five separate written responses appear underneath it. A tally cannot be smaller than the number of people who wrote in it, so the average shown is drawing on figures the page does not display. Read the five accounts and disregard the badge entirely.
