Brown Girl Dreaming

I thought that this novel, in particular, was very interesting to read because it was biographical (or at least written to sound like it was), yet it was written in prose/a poetic manner. Dealing with growing up during the Civil Rights movement, Brown Girl Dreaming details the struggles faced by the author. The development of characters are a bit slow in this book--a possible reason for this being that the author takes you through the life of a small child, describing an America being torn at its old and bigoted seams and thrust into an era of White America dealing with the increasing, albeit slowly, equality of Black Americans. The themes of race are extremely prevalent throughout the novel. This novel does a wonderful job of giving the reader insight to an America most, if not all, of us weren't alive to see; it does this in a way that is accessible, and the narrator in the novel seems to be for the most part just a bystander describing the scenery they are experiencing in prose.

I believe that this text positions young adults in such a way that they seem incredibly human. The narrator gives us vivid details on what it is like growing up in a segregated, and then non segregated, America. This is seen when the narrator describes the signs that say "whites only" as ghosts because they are painted over, but only just barely--just enough to cover the words, but not enough to swallow them into history. I would say that young adults in this novel are absolutely not portrayed stereo-typically. I would say that, if anything, the characters in this novel are very realistic--probably because they are real people. That is part of the excellence of this book: it provides you with the lives of not just characters, but real people that experienced and suffered through this time period. This text would appeal to young adults because it shows them what it was like for a person of color to grow up in this racially charged time period. It would also be kind of hard to get the students into the novel because it is written in prose/a poetic manner. It would be something that they would have to be eased into I think, just because they probably are not used to a book being written in this kind of manner.

Overall, I would give this book an A-. I think it is a wonderful book and it deals with a topic that I need to become more educated on, but I think that is has some accessibility issues because of the way that it is written. My qualms are not with the content of the novel, but with the way that is written. That is not to say that I don't like the way it is written, just that it is a bit different than what I, and others I'm sure, are used to reading. I would think this would be slightly difficult to teach to secondary students for this reason alone.