Brown Girl Dreaming

Locations
Call Number: Y BOCD 811 Wo, Kids BOCD / Fiction / Poetry & Plays / Woodson, Jacqueline.
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Westgate Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown Kids 4-week checkout	Y BOCD 811 Wo	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Pittsfield Kids A/V 4-week checkout	Kids BOCD / Fiction / Poetry & Plays / Woodson, Jacqueline.	4-week checkout	In transit
Westgate Kids A/V 4-week checkout	Kids BOCD / Fiction / Poetry & Plays / Woodson, Jacqueline.	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Compact discs.
Unabridged.
Read by the author.
Stories of the author's childhood from the '60s and '70s told in prose.

REVIEWS & SUMMARIES

School Library Journal Review
Booklist Review
Publishers Weekly Review
Summary / Annotation
Fiction Profile
Excerpt
Author Notes

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Enjoyable submitted by kimberlina on July 3, 2016, 12:21am Short poems read by the author that share the history of her family, stories of friends and relatives and her coming of age. Made a long car trip pass quickly.

powerful memoir in verse submitted by camelsamba on August 26, 2016, 3:19pm Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir of childhood in verse form. The author was born in 1963, so it includes the civil rights era. I read this book earlier in the year; this summer, I let the author read it to me in this audiobook. Not surprisingly, she does a masterful job! The memoir relates how Ms Woodson became a writer and story-teller. What I found especially powerful were her struggles to learn to read and succeed in school when viewed in light of her eventual success as an author.

I liked the meta or self-referential poems the most. One of the most poignant (considering the movement to get more diverse books) tells about how she gets to check out whatever books she likes from library. No one nags her to read more advanced books like her sister. She discovers a book titled Stevie:

Stevie and me (track 36, disc 3)

If someone had been fussing with me
to read like my sister, I might have missed
the picture book filled with brown people, more
brown people than I'd ever seen
in a book before.
...
If someone had taken
that 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.

Beautiful book submitted by irksit on June 27, 2018, 10:20am This book was really good in audiobook format. The author was born the same year as my mother and it really got me thinking about the contrast and similarities between my white mom’s stories of her childhood and Jacqueline’s stories.

Brown Girl Dreaming submitted by elenalibro on July 18, 2020, 4:26pm If I could I would stay hours and hours reading this book. It must have been so hard living in those times. Everything was so different (not in a good way). It was all so unfair. Normally I don't like reading memoirs but I love this one. I read line after line every thing so heart breaking. It is the perfect book: it's sad but I wouldn't call it a sad novel, it's tragic but not really. This book is the perfect mach for everything. I think there is a very big line between a lot of something and nothing at all, but this book is just right. People say that there is a good book or a bad book if I believed in that I would say its a really good book. This book thought me that you can do anything if you believe in it.