Brown Girl Dreaming

I really enjoyed listening to this beautiful book read by the author on audio book.

this book was.. different. and personally, it was very relatable. I wanted to honestly take my time with this one..and I did..sort of

Beautiful. Inspiring. Real. Lovely.

Lovely, threaded with sadness, but also love. Each poem/chapter has a topic, and the progression does not always feel linear, but the cumulative effect is to tell the story of Jackie's family and her growing awareness of herself as a writer. I read straight through without flipping to the end, so it was a delight to find pictures of the family on the last pages.

an autobiography in poems. I'm not a big poetry reader, but I quite liked this.

Gorgeous memoir in verse

Jacqueline Woodson shares her growing up years, years that are filled with the small and large agonies and ecstasies of childhood, all told in beautiful poetry.

Over and over, Woodson shares how much she longs to grow up and be a writer.

Oh, Jacqueline, how happy I am that you did.

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/

My review can't do this book justice. One that will stick with me for a long time. Can't wait to share this book with my girls.

Oh wow, this was beautiful. I was right there in all of those memories with her.

A short, sweet and beautiful autobiography.