July 14, 2010

Book Review: Put On Your Crown by Queen Latifah

Queen Latifah is a fabulously respected, savvy businesswoman. She is an Oscar-nominated actress, a Grammy winner, a Cover Girl, and a self-made entrepreneur. She has been an inspiration to many women and young girls throughout the years as she has proven time and again that you can become a successful woman without compromising yourself or your standards in order to fit into some magic mold society insists you must fit into.

Queen Latifah has been a positive role model when it comes to body image and body acceptance. That in itself was the reason why I was excited to read her newest book, Put On Your Crown. The book, she says, is “a wake-up call to empowerment”, written predominantly for young women after noticing the severe lack of self esteem held by young women, which she believes is an epidemic throughout the U.S. She wrote this book for those young women who need to know that as you learn and grow from the experiences of your past, you can use them to turn yourself into a strong, confident woman.

Put On Your Crown is not a typical self help book. It is not a book of pages upon pages of bullet points on how to miraculously find self confidence and start treating yourself like a queen. It is not written in a tone that screams “I’m a professional and I have all the answers, so listen to me and your life will become awesome!” While it could be classified as a self help book, the premise of Put On Your Crown has to do with moments in our lives that essentially make us who we are and how to take those moments and, regardless of how devastating or surreal, use them to better our lives and appreciate what we have in our lives.

Queen Latifah shares pivotal moments in her own life that fall under one of eight topics, which she has set up as chapters throughout her book. The moments range from the way her parents had treated her and her brother the same without leaving one of them left out, to the openness of her family and their unwavering support throughout her life, to finding out who her true friends were after she had become a celebrity, to the times she worked herself too hard and had burnt out when she was trying to launch her recording studio and then again when she had to appear for photographs and interviews, to becoming very wealthy and suddenly finding out she had gone completely broke, to going to see her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and to the sudden and tragic death of her brother. These moments, as well as many others that have shaped Queen Latifah into the woman she stands proud as today, are listed under the categories of success, beauty, money, love, fear, loss, strength and joy.

As she reflects on her past and the moments she has had in her life that have made her who she is today, she lends not only the stories of these moments to the reader, but also advice and compassion. Essentially, this should have been a great book for young women. The premise of the book is good, the morals of her stories are fantastic and she does touch upon very important topics, such as drugs, prostitution and violence breaking out everywhere in her hometown and telling her readers about her mother, who is also her best friend, who has always been a teacher and who has also committed herself to helping young people who were plagued by drugs and violence and has helped them. Realistically, I found this book to be filled with tiny, redeeming morsels among a book that, as a whole, I found dry, repetitive and boring. The hardcover edition of this book is small and at 197 pages where, if it were laid out in a standard 8×11″ book would make up even less pages, was pretty painful to get through. While I don’t have too much time to sit down and read a book to begin with, I could easily get through something of this size in a few days. Instead, Put On Your Crown took me a month to read and most of that time I spent staring at the book when I did have time to sit down with it, willing myself to pick it up and keep on reading.

I can definitely appreciate the tone of her book; it was not written by a psychologist or a trained professional, but straight from the source. Queen Latifah writes solely in her own voice, as you would imagine she would speak to someone who was talking to her in-person. While I typically enjoy what Queen Latifah has had to say in the past (not including her recent comment about how we need to stop “beating up” Chris Brown, of course), I think this book would have made a better blog–something a great deal shorter. I do not think that she had enough content to fill a book with, since I found her going back to the same stories, anecdotes and scenarios several times throughout the book and it got boring pretty fast.

Despite my boredom with Put On Your Crown, I was looking for something specific within its pages. I wanted her to elaborate more on body image and body acceptance. As a full-figured woman who has actually made a career for herself in Hollywood, she is widely seen as a role model for young women who has not given in to society’s need for thinness. Very early in the book she dedicated a section of her book to the topic, that topic being entitled Real Women Have Curves. She speaks about the pressure to lose weight that she felt throughout her career, frequently being told to lose weight by studio executives, but she had remained adamant on keeping her figure. As long as she was healthy, she liked her size. End of story. That is the Queen Latifah I was looking for. On the second-to-last page of her book, she erased that entire section on how much she liked the size she was and didn’t want to lose weight. In writing to her 19-year-old former-self, she writes, “Dana. Do you know who you are? Guess who you get to be! And guess what, you even get to lose weight!”

I’m sorry, but excuse me? Did I read that correctly? Wait, I went back and looked and yes, I did! For a woman who has solidified herself as a champion of body acceptance to end an entire book she has just written on that note is not only a letdown; it is absolutely devastating for any young woman who feels she is not pretty enough or thin enough and picked up this book thinking it would be something different.

By Holly

1 Comment

Posted in Books & Authors , Entertainment

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About the Author: Holly Ord

In addition to being the Founder and Editor of Woman Tribune, Holly Ord is a freelance writer, web designer and developer, feminist activist and blogger, and hopeless video game addict. She lives in Northeastern Pennsylvania and has been blogging on liberal politics and gender equality on her personal website, Menstrual Poetry since 2007.

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One Comment on Book Review: Put On Your Crown by Queen Latifah / Add Your Comment

F. D. says:

July 15, 2010 at 5:44 pm

Fail on Q.L. She should have left the letter out. Her book would have been great without it!

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