Why read Brown Girls?

Book cover of Brown Girls

Book description

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “boisterous and infectious debut novel” (The Guardian) about a group of friends and their immigrant families from Queens, New York—a tenderly observed, fiercely poetic love letter to a modern generation of brown girls.

“An acute study of those tender moments of becoming,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Brown Girls as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Namrata Poddar

Author

If character-driven fiction is a hallmark of the modern, Western, realist novel, here’s a community-driven novel recounted in the first-person plural narration for all of its 200 pages. As the title suggests, Brown Girls is a coming-of-age story of brown girls, children of immigrants, who grow up in Queens, New York, although the novel’s biggest innovation lies in the way it makes it impossible to nail down the protagonist. The book’s narrator-protagonist, the “we” who continues to talk in the book, refers to a consistently fluid, changing, and inclusive community of straight and queer brown girls from NYC who…

From Namrata's list on The best debut novels that subvert the mainstream Western novel.