"Why did we ever believe home could only be one place? When existing in these bodies means holding many worlds within us. At last, we see."

What a gorgeous, gorgeous novel. Told in the choral voice of "brown girls brown girls brown girls" from Queens, this short book follows their lives from childhood to adulthood, including the myriad paths the girls take in between. The book is incredibly specific and widely applicable at the same time. These brown girls represent many distinct cultures (specific foods, traditions and languages are mentioned throughout), yet at the same time, the book so perfectly encapsulates the essence of American girlhood that is their (our) shared experience. As a white reader, I know this book was not written for me, yet I think anyone who has been a girl will find something that speaks to them, and I hope it speaks to brown girls most of all.

A poetic love letter of Brown girls growing up in Queens. This books reads at a lightening fast pace. These girls grow to women all dealing with what it means to be an American, while holding on to their immigrant values. It points out what it means to be a daughter, cousin, friend and being a part of a community, while finding their true selves. All to the soundtrack of Mariah, Destiny’s Child, and Whitney.
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They do their best to find their own paths but sometimes the paths lead home.
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This book is available now.
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Thank you @randomhouse and @NetGalley for an advanced copy.

Loved the perspective overall! It felt a little immature at times but maybe that’s to provide the perspective of a young person. Being frustrated one chapter that someone assumes your shoplifting and a few chapters later discussing your stolen makeup… that’s immaturity, and that’s uncomfortable to read but maybe that’s the point! I’m still digesting my feelings but I enjoyed so much of this book.

I enjoyed this book. The description really made you get the feel of life in Queens, NY. It was a lovely story of young women of color trying to find their place in the world around them. Very insightful and completely worth the read.

I read this poetic debut in one sitting. The writing is ambitious and enveloping. There is no one plot, as the "we", brown girls of Queens, is narrating.

This book was BEAUTIFULLY written.
It starts off like this: “We live in the dregs of Queens, New York,where airplanes fly so low that we are certain they will crush us.” As a brown girl myself who grew up in a big city neighborhood but was smart and the only girl on the block who went to a different school who then had to downplay my smarts to fit in...Let just say I could relate.

The book follows a group of friends through their lives from childhood to adulthood. Told in short snippets, each section tells the story through the main characters’ lives as they grow up in Queens.

It's unexpected poetry. Loved it.

Thanks to Net galley and the publisher for an arc in exchange for an honest review

Brown Girls is a very unique style of novel. It is not plot driven, nor are there main characters. I wasn’t sure what to think at first, however the author has a beautiful, thought provoking way of writing that really connects you with the story. Brown Girls is told in short chapters, narrated by a group of friends and their lives growing up in New York as brown girls. I really enjoyed this book and can’t wait to read more from this author!

This was an interesting read. The writing was very unique because it had characters but it wasn’t really gold like a story. It’s about a group of young women of color that grow up in Queens. They are all from different backgrounds, all from immigrant families. They are trying to figure out who they are and where they fit in with the culture that they grow up in. All of the girls are trying to navigate their formative years in a place where they aren’t sure they really belong in. It reads like journal entries into what it is like to be a person of color in the US.

I loved the issues that were explored in this book. Race, class, and all the people who are marginalized in the US. The story telling was different from anything I’ve read before. I felt like I got to know a lot about Queens, and how each girl was trying to live up to their parents expectations as well as their own. Poignant, funny, honest, raw, thought provoking. This is a great debut from this author. Thank you Netgalley and Random House for the advanced e-galley in exchange for an honest review.

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades is a sparklingly vivid depiction of the lives of young women from immigrant families in Queens, New York. The story is told in short chapters spanning from childhood through young adulthood. Each chapter presents illuminating examples of common daily life occurrences from seemingly banal to traumatic. The writing style kept me from connecting with the narrator, but the descriptions of experiences and family life were vividly depicted. A fascinating, wonderful quick read.

Thank you Random House and NetGalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

What a wonderful book. A powerful, beautiful, lyrical, imaginative, poetic book about the lives of immigrant brown girls living in Queens, NY. This coming of age story gave me major feels because I grew up singing all the songs, experienced some of the same sad experiences in the book. The girls in this book are a beautiful, complicated mess just like me. It was wonderful to read and see representation of myself. The book also discussed misogyny/misogynoir, microagresssions, colonialism, and imperialism…all the sacrifices, horror, wonderful times of living in the US. A literal timeline up until the current time. Her writing reminded me of Diane McKinney-Whetstone l. I loved it. Five Stars for sure. Thank You Net Galley and the Publisher for the ARC.

Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades captures the lives of many different people as they grow up in the same town and experience different but similar experiences. The one thing they have in common is the color of their skin, in that it is not white and they are often ostracized because of their coloring, or of their names, and have to live up to both societal and internalized expectations. Some of them survive, some of them do not. Some have grand success stories and some do not. I loved how through the stories of everyone, the author shows how that there is no one universal experience of being a minority. It was a bit of a slow read, but overall a good one.

Title: Brown Girls
Author: Palasi Andreades
Publisher: Random House Publishing
Reviewed By: Arlena Dean
Rating: Five
Review:
"Brown Girls" by Palasi Andreades

My Opinion:

'Brown Girls' was quite an exciting collection of vignettes in the way this author brought it all out to the reader of the stories of these brown girls [friends] growing up in Queens, New York. This author did an excellent job as she 'depicted the lives of these teenagers through adulthood.' From middle school until ...as the journey consists of from middle school, on through college, going to their 'motherlands,' and then through their motherhood, the reader is given an insightful story.

These brown Girls [Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, Angelique], and others showed their uniqueness coming alive. Seeing the relationship they had with their moms was beautifully explored as they needed their commands. I loved the part where the girls were now women saw the sacrifices and the stories their moms had with them... now seeing their mothers as women with their own stories to tell.' To understand this part of the story...the reader will have to pick up "Brown Girls" to see how the author brings it all out.

It saw the girls try to reconcile their backgrounds with the American ways as they came of age. What happens as their paths change as they ascend the world? As the Brown girls went from childhood, motherhood, and beyond there will be quite an exploration, seeing the hardship, and by the end seeing all they had gone through, but they did return.

The author's works give the reader a poignant book that tells us well of 'Brown Girls' lives as the reader will be immersed in their stories. This was a good read, and I would recommend it to others.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the opportunity to read and review this book.

Engrossing and entertaining. I could have been any of those brown girls easily. I felt like the author had plucked pieces out of my life. Impossible to put down. One of the best debut books I have read yet. This is an author I am looking forward to reading more books by her. Happy reading!

4.5 stars-This is a poetic story that introduces us to many different girls that live in a section of Queens and grow up together. Their parents come from countries all over the world, and the girls have different cultures and religions, but what they all have in common is that they are “brown girls”. The girls (who grow up into adults by the end of the book) have unified experiences because of the color of the skin and the place where they grow up. Other factors unite them as well, such as having immigrant parents, brothers who navigate life in a different way than they do, and the need to success in school and be “good girls”.

Though the brown girls are united in so many ways, there are just as many life experiences that divide the girls, and that’s the way it is in adolescence, in female friendships, in life in general. I loved the gentle way the story flowed, and the way in which the girls are mentioned by name but not singled out at length. There are themes throughout the book of major topics such as gentrification, drug addiction, and class differences to name just a few, but the lyrical method of storytelling made the story feel less heavy.

Brown Girls is a fascinating, think-y story. It isn’t wholly clear who the main character(s) are and is told entirely with the pronoun tense of “we.” This is a super interesting, compelling read that I found difficult to put down. And the writing style flows beautifully, adding to the emotional impact. It is a story of growing up as a brown girl in Queens, NY, a story of friendships, and a story of family. Of figuring out your place in the world and finding connections to roots and community. It was a little shocking when Trump’s presidency and the Covid pandemic became a part of the book, but I think it added to the realism of the story and the experiences it was representing.

I spent most of my early years in Queens. It was where I got my early education, where I worked for a few years and where I gave birth to my children. However like many others, I moved away. I have no friends or family there now and the only time I have spent in Queens recently was traveling to and from an airport.
So when I saw the description of this book, I was fascinated. I know that Queens today is home to many immigrants from Third world countries in Asia, Africa, South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. So I expected to learn something of their complex lives. I was not disappointed.
This book relates the experiences of young immigrant girls coping with their family life and the world around them. Their hard working mothers have great expectations for them. They remind the girls often that the parents left their native countries to give their children more opportunities. The girls are told regularly to be quiet, to be obedient, to study hard and to become successful. Unlike other immigrant groups, they find that it is more difficult to assimilate when your skin color is different from others in the US.
The book is not written in a traditional novel story form. Instead it is a series of vignettes narrated by one or more of these girls. We see them in middle school, high schools, college and at the start of their careers. The stories continue as they mature into adults.
None of the narrators remain in Queens and some do not communicate with their families often. Some are satisfied with their lives but others have regrets.
I found this book to be well written but also quite informative. I have dealt with some recent Third World immigrants but never understood what their lives were like when they returned home from their jobs as nannies, hospital workers, nail techs, janitors, etc. Their homes in Queens are not far from where I once lived. However their lives are very different from the ones my friends and family when we lived in that borough of New York City.
The author, a Filipino woman born in Queens, has done a great job sharing the collective experiences of first generation immigrant women in Queens today.
I received this ARC from Net Galley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I was very much looking forward to a story of bonding. And sure, the writing was incredibly lyrical; however, even that couldn’t overcome my intense dislike of the third person plural presentation of the story. Or what is presented as a story, because we don’t follow individual characters as they age and grow. Instead we get a generic overview of an amalgamation of what may or may not have happened to someone or other. The presentation made it very difficult for my to connect to the characters or the story trying to be presented.

Sometimes, we feel a little lost wandering in this heavy world. We still hold scars from our childhood, particularly from that moment when we first realized that not everyone in America thought we belonged here—like that slur you heard hurled at your mom and then later at you on the elementary school playground. Later, we don’t care to admit how much our fathers’ raised voices or our mothers’ tears on the phone affect us when they hear we want to declare anything but what they deem to be “safe” majors, or in a couple of years, that we put in an application for a job that didn’t fall into what they believe is “conventional.” Our (white) friends try to tell us to follow our dreams, but really, what do they know when our parents left everything behind (sometimes fleeing war, persecution, and oppression) simply for the chance that we’d one day slip into the skin of America that symbolized everything they dreamed of but couldn’t possibly have?

Sometimes, we joke about moving to Canada or the countries our parents emigrated from and then joke about the joke by predicting how our parents would freak if they came all this way just to have their children go all the way back. And then the joke comes back to us because, like the girls in BROWN GIRLS, we ask ourselves: “The colonized, the colonizer. Where do we fall?” (and realize, like them, that we are both). Sometimes we swallow our own dreams but it only seems to whet our appetite. Because if our parents could dream big so can we. Because we can find ways to be true to who we are while still being the praise on the tip of our fathers’ tongues that they’re about to let roll at the next family gathering. Because we are contradiction. Because we wake up, remembering we are our parents’ children but we are also hyphenated Americans, grounded in this country we can shape as our own.

We wake up while we read BROWN GIRLS.

BROWN GIRLS is not entirely my story, but Daphne Palasi Andreades’ “we” embraced me as its own. I was so invested in these girls’ journeys and awakenings that I felt my own following along during the entire read. Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an ebook; BROWN GIRLS is out on January 4 🌞

Genre: literary fiction, ownvoices
Pub date: 1/4/22
In one sentence: A Greek chorus of brown girls from Queens tackle growing up, adulthood, and beyond.

I was drawn to this book by the gorgeous cover and the Greek chorus structure - the novel is written in 1st person plural with limited named characters. I enjoyed this departure from the typical novel structure, but I also found that I was really missing the individual voices I expect. Yes, some themes are universal, but individual experiences generate more powerful reactions and learning for a reader, in my opinion.

That being said, I'm still glad I read the book, and I found myself highlighting passages again and again. Andreades' writing has a lovely rhythm to it, and the book reads quickly as the girls move through childhood into their adult lives. I think this book will generate good discussion for book clubs, and I recommend reading it in tandem with an ownvoices memoir. 3.5 stars.

Thank you to Random House for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Although this book is written differently and can be kind of hard to follow, I really enjoyed it. As a former New Yorker, I think the author did a great job of describing the scenes and made it easy to imagine yourself there within the city. I also love the different perspectives the author used to tell the story. An easy read, but definitely a story that will stay with you long after you're done.