Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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An autobiography in verse

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

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4.5 stars Official book description: Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. […]

This is a beautiful gem of a book

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I don’t actually read poetry that comfortably. I mean this specifically that I don’t read books of poetry that comfortably. I tend to want to finish books and that leads me to moving through poetry too quickly. And so I often avoid collections, and since I teach high school English, I figure I get a decent amount of poetry in my life as a matter of course. Luckily for me, I listened to the audiobook version of this book read by the author and so […]

The Power of Words

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Jacqueline Woodson’s 2014 poetic memoir Brown Girl Dreaming won a slew of awards: a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, an NAACP Image Award, just to name a few. It is the beautifully told story of Woodson’s childhood, of the people and environments that formed both her and her dream of becoming a writer. It also offers glimpses into the civil rights movement and the experience of racism through the eyes of a child who witnessed […]

Unpretentious poetry I actually liked

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It’s an understatement to say that poetry is very much not my thing, but friends kept telling me that I HAD to read Brown Girl Dreaming and now I’m telling everyone here that they HAVE to read it. Well, no one’s going to make you, but you won’t regret it if you do. A book in verse sounds ominously pretentious, but Brown Girl Dreaming ended up being a refreshing and honest coming-of-age tale, simple enough for middle schoolers to understand and complex enough for adults […]



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