Daphne Palasi Andreades's titular Brown Girls live in "the dregs of Queens." They are Jamaican, Dominican, Pakistani, Filipino, Chinese. They are ambitious and bold and sometimes afraid of what the world might hold for them. They tell their story in Andreades's debut novel with a blazingly original collective voice.
Brown Girls begins when the girls are navigating the hallways of elementary and middle school, walking the neighborhood together. In brief chapters with titles like "Family Parties" and "Your Own Kind," she takes readers through the girls' shared journey to young adulthood. Some of them leave Queens for prestigious high schools in Manhattan, making the trek on the train to a different life, a different world, every weekday for years.
Andreades follows her characters through college, graduate school, additional training for their careers as nurses, teachers, bookkeepers, PR executives, professors. She sensitively explores the rifts that arise between the girls who build lives in the neighborhood--out of choice or necessity--and the girls who manage to get out. In some ways, Andreades's characters are of course particular: brown girls from immigrant families who hail from all over the globe, living at the back end of Queens in the early years of the 21st century. In some ways their stories are absolutely their own: Nadira, Kim, Zainab, Trish, fighting for their individuality in a society that tries to meld them together.
Told with crackling prose and vivid detail, with humor so sharp it cuts, Brown Girls is a tribute to a neighborhood most people forget, and a group of young women determined to make their mark on an indifferent world. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams