Yes, guilty as charged.  I admit that the idea of a novel in free verse stood as a barrier between me and Brown Girl Dreaming.  I had ordered the volume after reading about the flap with Daniel Handler at the National Book Awards, but let it languish until a transcontinental plane ride inspired me to pack up a few of the unread books I’d ordered over the past months–nothing like a plane ride for reading novels.

This is the kind of book that makes you want to go back.  I found myself moving back and forth between reading as an adult and reading as a former child, and at times wishing that the book had been there when I was growing up.  “Memory is strange,” Woodson writes.  “When I first began to write Brown Girl Dreaming, my childhood memories of Greenville came flooding back to me–small moments and bigger ones, too.  Things I hadn’t thought about in years and other stuff I’ve never forgotten.”  What I love about this book is how the reader’s encounter with Woodson’s childhood memories mirrors the author’s experience in writing the book.  Reading the book and writing it trigger repeated madeleine-like experiences.

I’m reminded of how odd it is that we have this category called YA fiction–Christina Phillips Mattson has written a dissertation on the topic (Harvard 2015 Ph.D.)! This is a novel about a childhood, and it captures that childhood as powerfully as Proust or Rilke did in their time.  Today more than ever, writers of so-called YA fiction are challenging a category that was most likely coined by someone in the publishing industry.  I have not yet tracked down the origins of the term, but I suspect it emerged in the 1950s and 1960s by someone who decided that the coming-of-age novel was not “adult” reading.  Could the phenomenal commercial success of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Golding’s Lord of the Flies have had something to do with it?

On another note (I could go on and on about Woodson’s book), here’s what I posted on Facebook:

I read Brown Girl Dreaming this afternoon and what should be in it but the Selfish Giant! Woodson describes hearing her teacher read the story and going to the library to borrow a copy of it. “I read the story again and again.” She memorizes the story and recites it to her classmates, who are deeply impressed. “But I just shrug, not knowing what to say. How can I explain to anyone that stories are like air to me, I breathe them in and let them out over and over again.” WOW
Remember Scout’s words in To Kill a Mockingbird: “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.”