Book Review: Brown Girl Dreaming / Jacqueline Woodson

This is a memoir -- in verse -- of the evolution of an author -- who happens to live in brown skin. How can a book get any better than that?

This book is so gently written. It will take you back to the 1960s and early 1970s when Woodson was just beginning her life. She was born in Columbus, Ohio - but spent most of her early life between places, the north and the south: Brooklyn, NY and South Carolina. And while the stark different between her grandparents red stone house with a porch for sitting and a yard big enough for gardening and playing AND living in Brooklyn where there is only one tree, people are crowded together and the air smells of city - the biggest difference was how a brown person had to walk so differently through each of these places. There was a freedom in NYC to walk through the neighborhood (though not past a certain street) that was different from the back-of-the-bus life in South Carolina. The vestiges of Jim Crow still colored the world in the mid sixties.

But this is more than living and growing as a person of color. Here Woodson shares her evolution as a writer. Her love of words and her different way of learning to read. She shares her love for her family. And finally, she draws a verbal picture of growing up in the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. Here you will find a life filled with double dutch and fireflies, friends and bullies, family joys and sorrows, living between two worlds, Christianity and Islam, words, words, words. 

One of my favorite quotes: 

"If someone had taken
that [picture] book out of my hand 
said, You're too old for this 
maybe
I'd never have believed
that someone who looked like me
could be in the pages of the book
that someone who looked like me
had a story."

You can find a print copy of this book in the South library. Nashua Public Library also has print copies and you can borrow the audiobook from Overdrive.