Brown Girl, Brownstones

By: Paule Marshall

Narrated by: Jody Lebel

Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

Brown Girl, Brownstones tells the story of a young Barbadian American caught between the ambitious dreams of her forward-looking mother and the rose-tinted nostalgia of her father. While Selina's mother strives diligently to save enough money to buy a brownstone in Brooklyn, her father dreams only of returning to his home in Barbados. Managing a constellation of difficult family and cultural dynamics, Selina is also faced with navigating the complex maze of immigrant identity in America and bearing the burdens of racism and poverty.

Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and WWII, the close-knit community of immigrants from Barbados where Selina grows up is drawn from the author's own experience as a young girl in Brooklyn. This novel, first published in 1959, was one of the first to probe the difficult cross-cultural conflicts and identities so integral to the experiences of America's innumerable immigrant communities. A vibrant and compelling tale of self-discovery, Brown Girl, Brownstones is a striking and honest novel about a too-often overlooked American experience.

©1959 Paule Marshall (P)2022 Licensing Management, Inc.

finally!

been waiting for this audio book, luckily the words are still descriptive and resonant despite the poor reading.