Ask a Bookseller: "Brown Girls" is a poetic chorus of voices

Mika Tuzon of Scrawl Books in Reston, Virginia recommends the novel “Brown Girls” by Daphne Palasi Andreades. Tuzon says two aspects of this debut novel made it stand out as unique. First was the form: it's told in a series of vignettes and written in the first-person plural, which means the women in this novel speak together as "we," like a modern chorus. Second, all of the narrators are women of color. They start as children growing up on the same street in Queens, NY., and we follow them through their lives.We see the ones who leave for college—and have their loyalties challenged for leaving—and the ones who stay or returned. Tuzon hastened to add that this book feels relatable even if you don’t live in Queens, and said she was thinking about this novel long after she closed the book.