The Children’s Book That Empowers Little Girls

It is a book that focuses on how young girls need to work on their power and understand themselves better. Ambitious Girl by Meena Harris is set out to be released in 2021. This book will surely prove to be one of its kind as it emphasizes the importance of young girls understanding their inner power. It talks about how women can start a change if they believe in their powers and the things that they stand for. 

The author talked about how this relates to her family as she was brought up in a family full of women. So, she has a lot of exposure to strong and powerful women throughout her life. Meena Harris believes that this is a simple message that needs to be shared across little girls. This led to the creation of the Ambitious Girl and how it aims to entice the ambition of girls from an early age to get them to be strong women.

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It feels somewhat surreal to say this, but I wrote another kids' book! It's about a girl who sees a strong woman on TV labeled as “too assertive“ and “too ambitious,” which sends her on a journey of discovery about the challenges faced by women and girls, and the ways in which they can reclaim words meant to knock them down. I was raised to believe that ambition was a good thing. Ambition means owning and living your purpose; it means self-determination. It never occurred to me until I was much older that this could be anything but positive, something to be celebrated. I've worked hard to make sure my own daughters are raised with these same values that shaped my childhood. So when I heard people criticizing one of the women in our family for being “too ambitious,” and it was amplified by the media, it stopped me in my tracks. Not because I hadn’t heard something like that before, but because, as a parent, I felt a new sense of urgency to make sure my young daughters—and girls all over—would have the tools and language to reframe what they'll inevitably hear in the “real world.” In writing this book, my greatest hope is that girls dare to define their own unique purpose in the world, and that they grow into strong, ambitious women. Thank you to my friends and family who supported me throughout this process, including sitting on the phone with me to rhyme words. I'm also so grateful to my agent @caithoyt and publisher @farrinj at @littlebrown for pushing me and helping me to develop as an author, and for my incredible illustrator @marissaarts, who made me cry multiple times for putting so much detail and care into bringing this to life. Ambitious Girl is available on January 19, 2021, but pre-sale officially starts TODAY, available wherever books are sold. More details at ambitiousgirlbook.com—link in bio!

A post shared by Meena Harris (@meena) on Oct 13, 2020 at 11:50am PDT

What Is The Story About? 

The story of the Ambitious Girl revolves around the protagonist who focuses on her ambitions to become whatever she wants. Whether it is an astronaut or a politician, there is nothing that the ambitious girl cannot do. This children’s book was heavily influenced by what Harris saw around in her own family mostly. 

Her aunt, a democratic vice presidential nominee was whom she took aspirations from as well. She has often been deemed as a bit too ambitious that only provoked questions in Harris’s mind about why women are considered too ambitious when trying to achieve something that they want. 

The story is about using your ambition as an asset more than anything else. It gives light to a more positive aspect of a girl’s ambition than what the real world has to offer. Harris wishes to normalize the idea of having ambition for young girls so that they learn to value themselves as they grow older. 

The Message Of The Ambitious Girl

Initially, as Harris penned her thoughts for the book, she thought about her daughters and the lesson she wanted them to take home. She wants little girls to read this and believe that they can do whatever they want to as long as they have their ambition with them. It is empowering for young girls to read this and learn that their ambition is not something that needs to be tossed aside. Instead, it is something that they can use to achieve things that they have always wanted to. 

Harris wants young girls to believe that they are powerful, strong, and smart. This book hopes to ignite that ambition amongst young girls and explain to them how important it is to follow through with what they believe in. Setting in this idea earlier in life is essential for young girls to develop a strong personality. 

The idea of the book is to fight off the double standards set in the world where women are looked down upon for their ambitious side. It hopes to enable girls to follow what they want to and become stronger as they grow.