Grace, Gold and Glory: My Leap of Faith by Gabrielle Douglas

Grace, Gold and Glory: My Leap Of Faith, is a truly inspirational autobiography written by Gabrielle Douglas, Olympic gymnast.

The autobiography picks out  the most significant moments from Gabby's career, and tells you all about them, like you're experiencing these moments with her. And that's why I really loved this book.

The autobiography starts at the very beginning of Gabrielle's life, and I'll tell you myself, the road to the Olympics for Gabby, was not an easy one. She was homeless from a very young age, and when her family did find a home, her parents decided to split, her father was a part of her life for scattered periods of time afterwards. In the book Gabrielle writes about many other challenges she faced, including serious thoughts of quitting gymnastics, good thing she didn't quit. Gabby explains the most important moments in her career including moments like when she moved to Iowa, and lived with a host family, just to further her career in the sport of gymnastics, or even as far back as when she first started gymnastics.

I think I enjoyed this book because, I learned so much about someone who I really admired. I didn't know 95% of the things Gabrielle wrote about in the book, so all the new facts I learned were really interesting. I also liked it because it's written somewhat like a story, it's comical then sad then happy, it's not just "I did this and then this happened." She tells the reader story after story but all of them are written like it's part of a fictional book. Anyone could read this as well, it's not crazy complicated like other biographies and it doesn't have a lot of gymnastics vocabulary.

This is most definitely the best book I read during the summer of 2013.