Brown Girl Dreaming

Brown Girl Dreaming is Jacqueline Woodson's memoir of her childhood, told in short free-verse poems. Born in Ohio in 1963, she spends her early years in Greenville, South Carolina, with her grandparents, at a time when the civil rights movement is reshaping the South and the rules of Jim Crow are still close at hand. Later she moves with her mother and siblings to Brooklyn, New York, and grows up between two very different places and two sets of family traditions. Through memories of her grandfather, her upbringing as a Jehovah's Witness, her friendships and her slow start as a reader, the poems trace how a girl who loves stories comes to know that she wants to be a writer. Quietly reflective and easy to enter, the book suits readers ten and up and works well for family or classroom reading about history and identity.