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A review by thedogmother
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades
5.0
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Loved this one so much I decided I’m gonna teach it in my high school classes!
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades is a love letter to the real New York City that exists on the margins of the bright and shiny city featured in movies and the popular imagination. It celebrates the multitude of cities within the city, "hidden, peripheral," but that are the heartbeat, life source, and engine that powers all that is New York. Andreades’ lyrical sentences combined with her choice to narrate in the first person plural works to illuminate the collective experiences of girls of color growing up as the second-generation children of immigrants. They face similar challenges, hail from cultures both beautiful and complicated, struggle up against their parents’ expectations ultimately born out of their sometimes suffocating love, and share in an immense joy and beauty.
Andreades explores what happens to those who leave and those who are left behind. Those who leave and find success far away at elite colleges, in prestigious
jobs, assimilate into the world of whiteness. They ask, "What happened to the girls we left behind?" not just after the old friends who never left the neighborhood, but
even more so of the brown girl they once were and lost sight of in their time away.
In a beautiful conclusion, Andreades confronts the death that awaits us all, when all that we've loved, all our pain, our sacrifice, our loved ones, are left behind. It's the end of the stream of consciousness love poem that is this novel, the lyrical, bittersweet love poem of brown girls' lives lived exuberantly.
Finally, my favorite quote: “In the middle of the night, when everything is quiet at last, we pick up phones. We do not think they will answer at this time. We are surprised when they do. How are you, Ma? we ask. We hear surprise in our mothers' voices, recognize an eagerness that mirrors our own. Oh! they say. It's you.”
Loved this one so much I decided I’m gonna teach it in my high school classes!
Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades is a love letter to the real New York City that exists on the margins of the bright and shiny city featured in movies and the popular imagination. It celebrates the multitude of cities within the city, "hidden, peripheral," but that are the heartbeat, life source, and engine that powers all that is New York. Andreades’ lyrical sentences combined with her choice to narrate in the first person plural works to illuminate the collective experiences of girls of color growing up as the second-generation children of immigrants. They face similar challenges, hail from cultures both beautiful and complicated, struggle up against their parents’ expectations ultimately born out of their sometimes suffocating love, and share in an immense joy and beauty.
Andreades explores what happens to those who leave and those who are left behind. Those who leave and find success far away at elite colleges, in prestigious
jobs, assimilate into the world of whiteness. They ask, "What happened to the girls we left behind?" not just after the old friends who never left the neighborhood, but
even more so of the brown girl they once were and lost sight of in their time away.
In a beautiful conclusion, Andreades confronts the death that awaits us all, when all that we've loved, all our pain, our sacrifice, our loved ones, are left behind. It's the end of the stream of consciousness love poem that is this novel, the lyrical, bittersweet love poem of brown girls' lives lived exuberantly.
Finally, my favorite quote: “In the middle of the night, when everything is quiet at last, we pick up phones. We do not think they will answer at this time. We are surprised when they do. How are you, Ma? we ask. We hear surprise in our mothers' voices, recognize an eagerness that mirrors our own. Oh! they say. It's you.”