Brown Girl Dreaming

Bibliography: Woodson, J. (2014). Brown girl dreaming. New York, NY: Nancy Paulsen Books.

ISBN: 0399252517

Genre: poetry, memoir

Reading Level/Interest Age: grade 5+; 10+

Plot Summary: As a little girl, Jackie doesn’t understand exactly what the Jim Crow laws are. But she does understand that living with her grandparents in South Carolina is different than living with her father in Ohio. She loves the feeling of dirt on her toes and ribbons in her hair. She knows she’s loved. Affection, though, only comes after the day’s hard work is done. Treats come only after the bills are paid. Friends are hard to come by, so Jackie and her siblings stick together, play together, cry together when their mama decides to move them to New York City. Though she misses all the people and sights and smells of South Carolina, Jackie gets to know the kids in her new neighborhood. Not all are friendly. Some mock her for sounding Southern, just as some kids back in South Carolina mocked her for sounding Northern. Is she Southern or is she Northern? Can’t she be both? And why do kids in both places tease her about being a Jehovah’s Witness? As she adjusts to life in New York, Jackie wants to read and to write, to share her thoughts with the world. But reading is hard for her, harder than it was for her siblings. She struggles through, though, never giving up because she knows that the key to her existence, the key to understanding herself, lies within letters and words and pencils and black and white composition notebooks.

Critical Evaluation: Brown Girl Dreaming is written entirely in free verse. There is, therefore, no specific meter to the poetry, so it reads more like a story than a poem. Punctuation and line breaks create rhythm, italics and words pushed together lend depth of voice. Woodson creates intriguing pictures through poignant imagery, pulling out beauty in the simplest parts of life: “After the sweet tea is poured into mason jars twisted tight…” (36). She shows us volatile distinctions in a world riddled with dichotomy and the honest imaginings of a girl trying to makes sense of that world. The poem “beginning”, for example, is placed 62 pages into the book--it’s not the beginning of Woodson’s physical life, but the beginning of her own story as she learns to curve lines into letters. The juxtaposition of her worlds, of black and white, city and county, are brought into careful focus as she explains with innocent clarity “that New York City is gray rock and quick-moving cars” (183) and that “the earth stops in a ceiling of stars” (131). Each carefully chosen word throughout this memoir has meaning; there’s no room for extraneous description, no place for redundancy or verbosity. Woodson is a master at selecting exactly the right image to convey the challenges of her homes and the depths of her emotions.

Reader’s Annotation: Jacqueline is caught between worlds: her mom and her dad, South Carolina and New York, black and white, Jehovah’s Witness and Baptist. How can she figure out who she is when everything in her world is always so different?

Author Information: Jacqueline Woodson is the author of numerous award-winning books for young adults, including Last Summer With Maizon, I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun, and Miracle's Boys. She started writing when she was young, but her fiction for kids didn't really click until she got older. That's when she realized that she could actually help the younger generation simply through her words.

That's why Woodson chooses subjects that she thinks kids should be able to read about — even if they're topics that are hard to explain or uncomfortable to talk about. For example, If You Come Softly is about an interracial romance; Hush tells the story of a family placed under the witness protection program; and Sweet, Sweet Memory depicts the way a young girl copes with her grandfather's death. Visiting Day is a picture book about a little girl's trips to see her father in prison. It's not every day you see a children's book about this topic, but Woodson believes that it is an important subject because lots of people have family members in prison, and she wants them to know that it's nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, Woodson says that Visiting Day is about the same thing that all her other books are about: caring about one another. “In Visiting Day, the people really love each other, miss each other when they're apart, and care a great deal about each other. This is what's most important to me — to show love in all its many forms.”

Woodson currently lives in Brooklyn, where she writes full-time and can be found in the mornings hanging out in Prospect Park with her dog, Maus.¹

Curriculum ties: writing; segregation

Booktalks: Moving away; family bonds

Challenge issues: segregation

Challenge Issue Resources:

• Library Selection Policy
• Rationale explaining why the item was chosen for the collection
• Active listening skills
• Awards
• Reconsideration form (as a last resort)
• Illinois Library Association (Banned Books Listings)
• National Council of Teachers of English “Right to Read”
• Positive and negative reviews: expert, parent, student
• ALA Strategies and Tips for Dealing with Challenges to Library Materials
• ALA Bill of Rights on Intellectual Freedom

• Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves. Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.
• Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.

Reasoning: Although Brown Girl Dreaming is classified as a children’s book, I believe it is entirely age appropriate for young adults. The protagonist, Jackie, undergoes a similar path through maturity as young adults do, expanding from childhood delights through familial discourse and social isolation and finally into understanding. Even though the entire book is in free  verse, it presents itself as a problem novel, a coming-of-age story. It mirrors the challenges that young adults often face, all while validating their opinions, concerns and decisions. I also believe that it is difficult for children to focus on the story within author Woodson’s free verse, that the experiences and emotions are much better suited to the level of comprehension that adolescents can achieve versus that of children. It has also received the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Young Adult Fiction. Brown Girl Dreaming is an excellent example of diversity in addition to providing opportunity for education, empathy and inspiration.

References:

¹"Jacqueline Woodson." Scholastic. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2015. <http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/contributor/jacqueline-woodson>.

Ralph, Kaylen. "Brown Girl Dreaming." Wit & Delight. N.p., 19 Jan. 2015. Web. 1 Dec. 2015.