Read You Can Do It: How to Find Your Voice and Make a Difference free in the Little Reads app.
Marcus Rashford and Carl Anka's You Can Do It: How to Find Your Voice and Make a Difference is a warm, chatty book for 10 year olds about speaking up and looking out for other people.
He starts with a season he'd rather forget. He'd been playing through a bad shoulder and a bad ankle. Then, at the Euro 2020 final, he came off the bench, stepped up for England's third penalty against Italy and hit the post. England lost.
The next morning he woke up to horrible racist messages, and someone vandalised the painting of his face in his hometown. Then people from all over the country covered it in notes of support. He explains what that meant to him, and it's quite moving.
From there he talks about looking after yourself. In the end he had surgery on that shoulder and three months off. His brothers kept telling him to go easy on himself. His advice is to treat your body like a TV remote with flat batteries (pressing the buttons harder won't help!).
Then there's kindness. When he was a boy, Greg at the corner shop on Button Lane never let him pay for sweets, because his mum was working three jobs. He says that's where his campaign to feed hungry children really began.
There's his school friend Jahedi, who was better at cricket than him (a big admission for someone this competitive). Visiting Jahedi's family taught him about their Muslim customs, and his own mum had house rules too. Shoes off!
It reads like a kind older brother talking to you. The big messages are shouted in CAPITALS, and there are little things to try along the way, like writing down three reasons you're proud of yourself.
You don't need to love football to get a lot from it. It's really about the moments when you feel you've let people down, and about being brave enough to speak up for someone else. Who doesn't need reminding of that sometimes?
It's frank about racism too, and clear about what to do. There's a list of rights if you're the target of it, and responsibilities if you're not.
If this one goes down well, we've also got You Are a Champion, the book he wrote before this one. It starts with him as a little boy on the sidelines at Hollyhedge Park, waiting for his big brother's mates to let him play.
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