Memoir in Verse Challenges Middle-Grade Readers: Book Review of Brown Girl Dreaming

 

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir in verse by Jaqueline Woodson. Woodson writes about her childhood in Ohio, South Carolina, and New York. Her parents split when she was very young and her mom moved with Jackie and her older brother and sister to Greenville, South Carolina, where life was completely different. There they lived with their grandparents and became acquainted with life in the South, including racism and segregation. Their grandmother practiced Seventh Day Adventism and while their mother no longer did, she expected her children to attend services. They are not allowed to play with many of the neighbor children, and so they were lonely.

Eventually her mother moved them to New York, where life was again completely different. There Jackie falls under her sister’s shadow as Odella has great academic gifts and catches on to new concepts quickly. However, one of the book’s strongest threads is Jackie’s love of stories, and the book takes pains to show how telling stories was both a passion and at times an obsession for young Jackie.

There is clear movement for Jackie from the beginning to the end of Brown Girl Dreaming, although the plot does not feel as strong as most memoirs. This is in large part because the book is broken into poems instead of chapters. At times it does not even feel episodic, as many memoirs do, but as though it is trying to capture an event in a moment, and the event is instead strangled by the lines, too trapped to express the whole of it. The lyrics do, however, add weight and beauty.

Would I teach this book? This past school year I did teach Brown Girl Dreaming. It was a choice book for the sixth graders, which a few chose and a few for whom I thought it would be good to push them in the direction of this book. Few students picked it as a first choice, and those who did read it were a bit frustrated with the poetry structure. We read a few of the book reviews that were published when the book first came out, such from The New York Times, Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews. Students were asked to read the reviews and determine what they agreed and disagreed with. It was a challenge in some of the reviews for them to identify what was summary and was opinion. We practiced using evidence to support whether we agreed or disagreed with the writer. We also discussed windows and mirrors in the story, and students were instructed to include a specific example of both a window (something that felt different from their own experiences) and a mirror (something that felt similar to their own experience) in their own reviews.

It was not a favorite among the students I think, in part, because it was so different from what they have read before. The lines and stanzas asked to be read differently from sentences and paragraphs and resist being read through quickly, as many adolescent readers believe that it is the ability to read quickly which makes someone a good reader. The dramas of moving and wishing for a deep, forever friendship resonated the most for them.

 
If you wish to share materials or see the formative and summative assessments I used in teaching Brown Girl Dreaming, please DM me.

 

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