Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsRe-reading Brown Girl,Brownstones
Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2016
Despite the fact that I had read almost every book in my high school library ...read secondary grammar school in the UK, by the time I left, I did not find this book until I was an undergraduate at 19 at Bristol U.
As a child of a bajan mother and a biafran father it spoke to many of my questions about identity as a Bajarian born in Britain,ntyen raised in Lagos,Enugu Umahia and Shepherd's Bush ! As the eldest of four siblings , I understood the fierce pride and love with which my mother carried us solo into our lives ,following our separation from our father during and after the Biafran war.
I love Paule Marshall's rich layered complex writing and the many places in which both Silla, the mother character and Selena, the young protaganists stories echo my own. The discovery of racism and its impact on Selena is one of the most poignant I have ever read. I now llive and work in and around present day Fulton St and Brooklyn so that too makes me love the book.
I am sharing this novel with my husband and my teenage daughter that they may better understand the kind of forces that shaped me.
