Brown girl, Brownstones (1959) by Paule Marshall

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

by Paule Marshall

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island/Staten Island: 8/28

New York: 81/105

  Brown Girl, Brownstones was a pioneering bildungsroman about the experience of growing up black and female in an immigrant family.  Like other pioneering books from the POV canon, Marshall takes her place on the basis of being the first, or one of the first, to express this particular point of view- I can only imagine what her conversations with publisher were like before someone agreed to publish her book.  Told from the point of view of a young woman in a Barbadian immigrant family. Brown Girl, Brownstones that would, in the future, come to embody the pov bildungsroman, but must have been very fresh indeed at the time of publication.  In her New York Times obituary they wrote that this book is, “the novel that most black feminist critics consider to be the beginning of contemporary African-American women’s writings.”

  That is pretty impressive, because contemporary African-American women writers exploded into the consciousness of the reading public about a decade later.   Selina Boyce, the protagonist, is 10 when the book starts, a witness to on-going disputes between her mom, a no-nonsense type, and her husband, a gauzy dreamer.  

 By the end of the book, Selina is a college student who is dreaming of an artistic, bohemian life while she carries on with a young veteran who lives in her Brooklyn neighborhood.  It's a memorable journey, and never seems dated in its prose or themes.

  I checked the census website and as of 2021 almost 17% of adult Americans did not have children. That would make them the most dramatically underrepresented demographic group in the entire 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project, I think.  I guess you could add in the books where the protagonists are young adults who just haven't had kids yet.