By Esther Callens
Award winning author, Jacqueline Woodson allows young readers to step into her world with her latest book. Brown Girl Dreaming presents her poignant memoirs of an innocent child that grows up in a world filled with unimaginable surprises. Written through the means of lyrical poems, Woodson paints a vivid picture that is not soon forgotten.
Brown Girl Dreaming, relays what it was like for Woodson to be raised up during the 1960s in the South and North. She tells of being a little African American girl that is living, caught in two very distinct worlds. Not long after she turned 1-year-old, her family unit split leaving her father in Columbus, Ohio. Her mother gathered her and her siblings and went home to Greenville, S.C. It was here that she learned of a grandfather with a garden filled with “Sweet peas and Collards” that takes her to the “Candy Lady House” and a grandmother that cooks biscuits, hot combs hair and tells of Noah’s Ark. She also heard of students marching, white only bathroom and the words –colored, Negro.
Years later in New York, the willow trees and crickets are replaced with sidewalks and big old buildings. However, Woodson finds a best friend named Maria, school, libraries filled with books and writing occupying her time. It is remarkable! Brown Girl Dreaming is Jacqueline Woodson at her finest. It is a wonderful work of realism that is written beautifully.
Author’s bio: Jacqueline Woodson has won several lifetime achievement awards including the Margaret A. Edwards Award in writing for young adults, the St. Katherine Drexel Award, and the 2012 Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Reader’s Literature, as well as being shortlisted for the 2014 Hans Christian Andersen Award. She has received three Newbery Honors for the books After Tupac & D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. She won the Coretta Scott King Award and the LA Times Book Prize for Miracle’s Boys. She won a Caldecott Honor for Coming on Home Soon, and the Jane Addams Peace Award for Each Kindness and has been a National Book Award finalist twice for Hush and Locomotion.
