JoeyPinkney.com Book Review
Letters to a Young Sister: DeFINE Your Destiny
by Hill Harper
(Gotham)
5 out of 5 Stars

From the foreword by Gabrielle Union to the email from Nikki Giovanni just before the acknowledgement page, Hill Harper’s Letters to a Young Sister is a beautiful dialogue between Hill Harper and a fictitious African American girl. Harper employs the wisdom of his famous, yet forthcoming, friends as he offers advice on a multitude of topics from sex to sexism and almost everything in between. Hill Harper writes in a voice that is like an older, caring brother instead of being preachy like a parent.

Letters to a Young Sister grew out of a vocal desire for a book for females while Hill Harper was touring to promote Letters to a Young Brother. Letters to a Young Sister definitely stands on its own merits with the theme being DeFINE Your Destiny.

Hill Harper does not try to tackle all of the questions by himself. He gets input from a group of extraordinary African American women. From Eve to Ciara to Michelle Obama to Alfre Woodard, each person shares words of wisdom and inspiration relevant to the question that the young sister poses to Hill Harper.

There is truly no other self-help book on the market that you can hand a young African American female that is on point in terms of appropriate cultural references to today’s music, technology and methods of communication. Letter to a Young Sister comes across more so like a story. The readers gets to look over the shoulders of both Hill Harper and the “young sistah” as they try to make sense of and navigate the beauty and pitfalls of maturing into a unique African American woman in today’s society.

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