Throughout the book Woodson has a series of “How to Listen” poems. This time and space, allowing for our own memories, is a gift to the reader. Because it is a poem, and the lines are separated by a space-and-a- half and sometimes more, the reader has time to slow down and think over what has just been read.

For those readers who have just said, “Whoa….I don’t want to read poetry,” hold on, take a deep breath, and trust me that by the time you have finished the first page, you will have forgotten it is one long poem. What makes Woodson’s memoir stand out as something even more special is that it is a poem, written in free verse. Almost every reader, regardless of ethnicity, will find themselves throughout Brown Girl Dreaming. These memories are as universal as they are intimately personal to the author. Just as the Underground Railroad, the burning of churches and the back seats of buses help to define the struggle for freedom throughout this memoir, so too, do the memories of a child searching for her place, not just within her family but within the world unfolding before her.

Woodson spent her youth in both the South and the North as the fight for civil rights was picking up steam, and her memories of growing up in those years and locations make this a quintessential book in the canon of Black American Literature. As a matter of fact, I’m guessing that it will be the older reader who will hold it most dear.īrown Girl Dreaming is the memoir of an African American girl, born in 1963 in Ohio. Award-wining author Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming may have been published for middle and young adult readers, but this is a book for every reader, young or old.

Our gracie aunt by jacqueline woodson