The title of Jacqueline Woodson’s National Book Award winning verse memoir puts the spotlight on the writer-to-be the epigraph from Langston Hughes’ “Dreams” evokes the challenges that require this brown girl to “hold fast” to her aspirations in the “USA-/a country caught/between Black and White” (1). Verse/Memoir/Kunstlerroman/Race in America/Family Reviewed by Melanie Koss, Chicago, Illinoisīrown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson This novel has made DeWoskin a debut author to watch. Emma’s story is heart wrenching and poignant, full of despair, humor, and ultimately hope. The reader is put into Emma’s shoes, and experiences coping with blindness not as a victim, but as a real person learning to accept and overcome inevitable life challenges.
Told through Emma’s eyes, DeWoskin brilliantly uses vivid description through touch and sound to allow the reader to “see” the world the way Emma sees it. When tragedy strikes her town again when a classmate is found dead from a possible suicide, Emma seeks answers to her classmate’s death in an attempt to make sense of her own ability to survive. Viking Children’s Books, 2014, 416 pp., $17.99īlindness/Coping with tragedy/Suicide/SurvivalĮxperiments/Single parent families/Fathers/Science FictionĪfter losing her eyesight in a freak accident, fourteen-year-old Emma Sasha Silver must relearn how to “see.” Through the support of family and friends, Emma struggles to understand her new reality, returns to her close-knit high school, and finds that even though things remain the same, everything is actually different.
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