Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson (2014)
“A childhood lived across the civil rights era, told in poems so precise they feel like memory itself — and a love letter to the power of words when the world refuses to hear you.”
EraContemporary
Pages337
Difficulty★☆☆☆☆ Accessible
AP Appearances2
Character Analysis
A child caught between two worlds, two cities, two grandparents' visions of survival — and gradually discovering that between-ness is not a failure but a gift. Her reading difficulty is the book's central paradox: the future writer cannot read. Her gift for story exists before she can transcribe it, which means the book is in part about the many forms literary intelligence can take before it finds its form.