Woodson, Jacqueline. Brown Girl Dreaming. New York, NY: Puffin Books, 2014.
2. Plot Summary
This beautiful, powerful, memoir in verse by Jacqueline Woodson takes readers on a journey through Woodson’s childhood during the 1960s and 1970s. Readers feel the childlike wonder and growing awareness through Woodson’s accessible, rich poetry as Woodson paints a picture of what it was like to grow up African American during the civil rights movement. Woodson also describes her family and her growing love of writing and storytelling.
3. Critical Analysis
Jacqueline Woodson’s poems in Brown Girl Dreaming, written in free verse, are a mix of slow, flowing poems like changes and punchy, playful poems like our names and poems that follow the unique rhythm of what they’re about like brooklyn rain. She employs a heavy use of alliteration, yet it creates a light, breezy feel in her poetry like the line "our swing set is silent...snow covering it...stay inside on Sunday” from the poem god’s promise. Woodson also plays with metaphor like “painful stone inside my mother’s heart” and “this place is a greyhound bus” as she describes her childhood memories expressing both the joy and sadness in the events that made up her youth. Her poems are written with simple words making them easily accessible to middle grade readers. Her poems have a curious, childlike voice. She uses italics to denote other speakers helping readers get a sense of what family members, teachers, and other people in her life were like, or at least how she perceived them when she was a child. She references historical moments with wonder as she explains what she saw growing up in the 60s and 70s “as the south explodes” not long after Ruby Bridges, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights activists were fighting for equality; Woodson writes in south carolina at war, “we are sitting at his feet and the story tonight is why people are marching all over the South…” Woodson’s writing is beautiful, powerful, inspirational, and comforting. Middle grade readers as well as adults will be moved by her memoir in verse.
The cover of Brown Girl Dreaming shows a dream-like horizon of water colored blues and yellows, a shadowed young girl standing with a book in hand as butterflies seem to leap out of the book, fly into the sun, and bloom into flowers at the top of the cover. The pages of the book are textured creating a soft, worn feel in the readers hands. It’s as if the reader is holding the journal from Woodson’s childhood, filled with her memories and stories.
4. Award(s) and Review Excerpt(s)
- 2015 Newbery Medal
- 2015 Coretta Scott King Book Award
- 2015 NAACP Image Award
- 2014 National Book Award
- From Kirkus Review: “Woodson cherishes her memories and shares them with a graceful lyricism; her lovingly wrought vignettes of country and city streets will linger long after the page is turned.”
- From School Library Journal:” With exquisite metaphorical verse Woodson weaves a patchwork of her life experience, from her supportive, loving maternal grandparents, her mother's insistence on good grammar, to the lifetime friend she meets in New York, that covers readers with a warmth and sensitivity no child should miss. This should be on every library shelf.”
Gather other books by Jacqueline Woodson such as:
- Before the Ever After. ISBN 0399545433
- Behind You. ISBN 0142415545
- If You Come Softly. ISBN 0142415227
Gather other novels in verse for middle grades such as:
- Alexander, Kwame. The Crossover. ISBN 0544935209
- Lai, Thanhhá. Inside Out and Back Again. ISBN 0061962791
- Warga, Jasmine. Other Worlds for Home. ISBN 0062747800
Pair other texts about the civil rights movement and key people such as:
- Bridges, Ruby. Through My Eyes. ISBN 9780590546300
- Giovanni, Nikki. Rosa. ISBN 0805071067
- Evans, Shane. We March. ISBN 1250073251
Have students write their own “I am from” poems after reading.
Guide students in creating a map of the places Jacqueline Woodson spent her childhood as well as the historical events she mentioned in her poems.
Have students research one of the people from the civil rights movement that Jacqueline mentions in her books and present.
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