Gymnastics Diaries: Beam Queen by Georgia Godwin, Laura Sieveking and Amanda Erb (illustrator)

Title: Gymnasitcs Diaries: Beam Queen

Author: Georgia Godwin, Laura Sieveking and Amanda Erb (illustrator)

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st July 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 128

Price: $14.99

Synopsis: Georgia is 10 years old and loves gymnastics. She wants to be an international gymnastics star and this is her diary. Join Georgia as she chases her dreams! Georgia has started training in a new, Elite squad, and it is a whole new challenge for her. New friends, new coaches and new skills to learn! On top of that, she is competing in her first Team Comp, and the squad are relying on her beam routine. Will she fall off? Or will she become the new Beam Queen?

~*~

Ten-year-old Georgia is a gymnast, and she dreams of being an international gymnast one day. When she is invited to join a new, elite squad, she jumps at the chance. But it means leaving classes with her BFF, training with girls who are much older than she is. And to top it off, she is going to be thrust into her first team competition with Aalia, Hayley, Bella, Lilly and Amaya not long after she starts. Everyone has their own strengths on the various gymnastics’ equipment and apparatus – but two of them are good at the beam – Georgia and Amaya.

But when her team has to compete without Amaya after a training injury, after she tried to do something she’d never done before, the team must rely on Georgia to round things out and help them win the competition.

In this first book in a new series, we meet Georgia as she sets out to make her dream come true from co-writing team Georgia Godwin, and Laura Sieveking, author of the fabulous Ella at Eden series. This time, this series is told in a diary form to engage junior to early middle grade readers with an interest in gymnastics and friendship stories. What worked well was that it explained gymnastics to readers to those who may not be familiar with the sport as well, so this means that it’s not only for gymnastics kids, but for all readers who want to read this book and get to know Georgia. I have always found the first book in a series to be important to set the tone for the story and characters, and it feels like Beam Queen has done this to help get readers interested in it. And hopefully, to get them into the rest of the series as well.

Throughout the book, we see Georgia go through many ups and downs, her worries about school and not seeing Bri as often, her new gymnastics team, and her teacher’s determination for the class to learn a hip-hop dance to perform for the assembly – with very poor results! This is a fun read, because it is filled with the sort of schoolyard and friendship chaos that kids have in their lives – finding new friends and maintaining older friendships. The conflict within this book is more within Georgia – she needs to find a way to make all her friendships work throughout the book while she forges a new path for herself. This was something that stood out to me, because it is something that children and readers can relate to, particularly in primary school when things can change a lot for people.

Whilst this book uses easy to read language, it will still be appealing for a wide range of readers, because different readers need different books at different times, and for a range of reasons – maybe they’re struggling to read, maybe they need something that combines reading and something they are interested in to get them excited about books, or maybe they want something lighter amidst the longer books that they explore and read, and a series or book like this is good for that. I hope that young readers enjoy this book and series, and that they find something about it that speaks to them.