Brown Girls

Reviews

“[Daphne Palasi] Andreades’s descriptive writing is glorious, with a confidence one might expect from a veteran novelist . . . . While there is much that many brown girls will relate to—including experiences that feel stolen straight from my memories—Andreades succeeds in making the stories feel specific beyond a singular experience. . . .  Readers become part of scenes where the fourth wall is not only broken but shattered. . . . With their breadth, depth and enormous richness, I found myself wanting to savor these raw stories on a large, overflowing plate.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] boisterous and infectious debut novel . . . Brown Girls reads like a rap song, like an anthem. . . . [It] holds worlds within its pages.”—The Guardian

“Brown Girls achieves immediate liftoff. . . . Along the way a lot of subjects are turned over for examination. Like a DJ, the author picks up the needle and puts it back down in unexpected places. . . . Fearless.”—The New York Times

“Of the five New York boroughs, Queens still feels like the scrappy kid sibling, underestimated, perhaps, and underexplored. Daphne Palasi Andreades’s exuberant debut novel offers a corrective to that assumption of the neighborhood and its denizens with its kaleidoscopic portrait of the young women of color who call it home. Written in a choral ‘we’ voice, Brown Girls feels like finding your favorite song on the radio and singing along with the windows down.”—Chicago Review of Books

“A poetic story for anyone who has longed to leave home only to find that home resides within you.”—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

“An irresistible chorus of remembrances, a lyrical ode to brown girlhood. It is also an ode to Queens, and the multiethnic first-person plural sounds like the borough itself, rich and varied and glorious. I absolutely loved this book.”—Emma Straub, bestselling author of All Adults Here

“A masterful triumph. Every page captures moments of wonder and hard truths about brown girls coming of age, grappling with conflicting influences, loss, gender, sexuality, and being second-generation immigrants in America.”—Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Patsy

“This book’s a gift—a smooth subway seat on a crowded Queens local bound to everywhere and offered to those people, places, and dreams that forever keep and feed us.”—Paul Beatty, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Sellout

“Brown Girls is alive with the complicated yet vast love of immigrant mothers, American daughters, and childhood friends. I treasure this book’s artistic daring, its pathos, and its marvelous playfulness.”—Megha Majumdar, bestselling author of A Burning

“Inventive, sharply funny, and exceptionally beautiful. A portrait of growing up as a woman of color in America, the voices of these girls ring out on every page, lyrical and fierce and unforgettable.”—Elissa Schappell, author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls

“Seething with raw, exuberant life, Brown Girls is an epic told in the register of the yearning, vivid experiences of its characters. It’s hard to think of another book with more spirit or a keener eye.”—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
 
“Andreades’ debut novel is a unique coming-of-age story screamed, sung, howled, hummed by ‘we,’ a first-person plural narrator representing a group of friends from Queens, New York, on the cusp of womanhood. Writing in vignettes, with language that is as punchy as it is lyrical and impassioned, Andreades explores intersectional issues of womanhood, race, and class. . . . Singing as one, Andreades’ brown girls create and capture the voice of a generation.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Expand reviews