Brown Girl Dreaming

Short thoughts: This is really an incredible book. A memoir entirely in verse. I listened to this, but also used Amazon's preview feature to read some of the verse. I am going to buy this in print and read it again because while the narration was excellent and I think the best way for me to hear it first, I need to see the verse and read it slowly to get the brilliance of the structure.

I read this back to back with Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings because they both came up on holds from my library back to back, but they paired nicely. Two memoirs of childhood by two Black women a generation apart. They had far different experiences, but still many overlapping realities. Divorced parents, living with grandparents for a while, rural and urban life as children.

And apart from the verse, they were similarly story focused, although Brown Girl Dreaming was more chronological. Both well worth reading.

My slightly longer thoughts are on my blog at http://bookwi.se/brown-girl-dreaming/