Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Brown Girl Dreaming
I was completely underwhelmed by this book and I think perhaps it had everything to do with the lyric style. I felt this was a very character driven piece in which the characters are not discussed as much as I would like. There was a lot more I wanted to know about her father, her younger brother's father, her mom, her grandparents, and her siblings. It moved so quickly that everything felt almost inconsequential. It was a memoir of her life, and as important as it might be to her, it was not important to me at all. My other issue with it is that I just wasn't convinced that the narrator was really a child. She wrote like an adult and didn't even try to give the impression that she was the age that she was trying to write as. It was hard to take it seriously. Overall, it was an easy read, but an incredibly forgettable one and I don't think that had to be the case. I certainly don't feel that this deserves a national book award, but that's just my opinion.
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I feel the opposite, actually...I really liked the lyrical style. Of course, I did want to know more about what happened the father that disappeared from the page and about the mother, but she's writing about her life and her experiences, and maybe she doesn't remember...
ReplyDeleteI know you don't think she pulls off the "writing as a child thing", but not writing about these people might be part of that. Like, as a child, you have no idea what the hell is going on. Dad's gone and you don't know why, but you have to be deal with it because you don't know how to change it. I dunno. Something to think about.
This didn't feel National Book Award-y to me, either. Maybe it would be profound to people who had more of a connection, but it seemed like a typical themed book. Too typical.