HOMESICKNESS
lonely outsider status echoes through Zuhour’s never-ending dreams and thoughts. Nostalgia and longing conveyed through abstract metaphors and interior dialogue.
BROWN GIRLS
Andreades, Daphne Palasi Random House (224 pp.) $24.00 | Jan. 4, 2022 978-0-593-24342-8
Eight richly descriptive stories examine the various textures of disappointment in families and communities where success is not the norm. The stories in Barrett’s second collection, set in present-day Ireland and Canada, reveal a different sort of malaise than the title might suggest: Their characters are not so much longing for home as sickened by a place of psychological damage and, frequently, senseless violence. In the opening story, “A Shooting in Rathreedane,” that violence, as well as Barrett’s pitchdark sense of humor, is on full display, as police officers in County Mayo head out to a farm to investigate the shooting of a young miscreant, “one of those prolific, inveterately
y o u n g a d u lt
A masterfully executed ode to brown girls on their journeys of becoming. Andreades’ debut novel is a unique coming-of-age story screamed, sung, howled, hummed by “we,” a first-person plural narrator representing a group of friends from Queens, New York, on the cusp of womanhood. Writing in vignettes, with language that is as punchy as it is lyrical and impassioned, Andreades explores intersectional issues of womanhood, race, and class. Her chorus asks what it means to embody both the colonized and the colonizer: as American children of immigrant parents who speak English better than their mother tongue. As students at Columbia University who worry about undocumented family back in Queens. As people who realize that home will always mean two places at once. Andreades skillfully navigates multiple literary and political challenges. The novel successfully argues for a specifically American identity politics that eschews nationality or geographic region for a common experience of marginalization. The brown girls have roots in such diverse places as Ghana, India, and Mexico yet can believably speak as one chorus. To pull off a novel with basically no individual characters or character development that conveys an intimate story of becoming— a bildungsroman—is no easy feat. This book is (unbelievably!) a page-turner; Andreades accomplishes this with the energy and joyful beauty of her prose, which keeps the book moving at a reckless pace. Andreades’ brown girls speak with one voice without being reductionist. She pays homage to the brown girls who have left Queens and those who have stayed, straight and gay, teen murder victim and thriving career woman, parent and intentionally childless: The list goes on and on. Singing as one, Andreades’ brown girls create and capture the voice of a generation.
Barrett, Colin Grove Press (224 pp.) $27.00 | May 3, 2022 978-0-8021-5964-9
|
kirkus.com
|
fiction
|
1 april 2022
|
7
