June Wrap-up and July Hopefuls

Two of my June reads

June Wrap-Up

• Finished: 9
• Started but not finished: 2
• Total pages read: 2,738
• Average rating: 3.944

I had not expected that I’d read so many books in June! I thought I’d have time to finish five books, but I read four more. In the beginning of the month, I read one novel in verse, Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (5/5 stars), which was also my favorite book of the month. I also read Sarah Brooks’s steampunk fantasy The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands (3/5 stars), which unfortunately was a bit of a disappointment.

Book Review: Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Book title: Brown Girl Dreaming
Author: Jacqueline Woodson
Genre: Memoir, novel in verse
Published: August 28, 2014
337 pages
My rating: 5/5

Brown Girl Dreaming is Jacqueline Woodson’s memoir or autobiographical novel in verse about her youth in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Born in Ohio and raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In her poems, she talks about growing up as a brown girl, her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement, and her love of stories even while she struggled to learn to read.

I was maybe expecting a novel in verse to be more poetic, but Woodson’s poems read almost like prose. I don’t know if this is because I read the book in a Finnish translation and poems are notoriously difficult to translate, or if the translation accurately captures Woodson’s style. Whether the lack of lyricism is a minus is a matter of taste. I probably only paid attention to it because I’m not the target audience for this middle grade book. The prose-like style makes the book easy to read and understand for younger readers.