Review | Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Brown Girl Dreaming won the 2015 Newbery Honor award as well as the National Book Award. It’s a biographical story about the author, Jacqueline Woodson’s childhood.

This book had a big impact on me. I was so touched during some parts, that I got a little teary while listening to it. It helped me to see and realize things about slavery and civil rights that I never had before.

I am very removed from the things that happened in the South because of the very Caucasian community that I live in. There just aren’t a lot of African-Americans that live in Utah. As a result, I’ve never really taken the time to think about how it wasn’t very long ago that slavery happened. In my religious culture, we often talk about the pioneers that migrated to the Utah valley. My great-grandmother was born in Utah, but her grandparents made the trek west. To me, these pioneer stories don’t seem to have happened that long ago when I think about my own great-grandmother, who I had a close relationship with, was so close to the people who the stories are about. This is similar to Jacqueline’s Woodson’s relationship to slavery and members of her own ancestry. Making this connection kind of blew my mind about how it really hasn’t been that long since slavery was a common practice.

I was also born post-Civil Rights marching, so even the Civil Rights movement has seemed somewhat distant to me. I see things like Ferguson on the news and I don’t quite understand it because I’ve honestly never felt that as it relates to equality, black people are any different from white people. That the author was living in the South during Civil Rights marching put into perspective just how little time has passed since those things happened.

I think this book would be a fantastic conversation starter for parents/teachers and young people. At age six, my daughter has so many questions about the world around her. In school she has been learning about Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. I think this book would be a wonderful way to further that conversation with her about slavery, civil rights, and how we treat other people who don’t look the same as us.

There were a few political and religious undertones in the book, as these things had a huge impact on Woodson’s life, but they weren’t so much there that I was turned off from the book or felt that it was trying to persuade readers to a specific set of beliefs.

I listened to the audio version of Brown Girl Dreaming. It is read by the author, Jacqueline Woodson, which I felt made it more interesting. At the end of the audio version, Woodson gives a brief explanation of how she came to write Brown Girl Dreaming and some of the help she received from family members and friends while writing it.

Brown Girl Dreaming is written in poetry verse. Because of this, in addition to listening to the audio version, I wanted to spend some time looking at the book itself. It’s beautiful, and a great resource for exposing young people to poetry. The audio version is very good, but there is no doubt that in written poetry form, the story has more depth.

Woodson has also written a picture book that I have always really liked and own. The Other Side is a great story about two little girls, black and white, who become fast friends and transcend the prejudice that sometimes exists between ethnicities.

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Title: Brown Girl Dreaming
Author: Jacqueline Woodson
Genre: Children's Books
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Release Date: August 28, 2014
Pages: 336

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