Brown Girls
Order the book through your local bookstore, online, or check your local library for digital and physical loans.
Context Links
- A Chorus Of Voices: Talking With Daphne Palasi Andreades (The Rumpus)
- All That We Can’t Leave Behind: An Interview with Daphne Palasi Andreades (Asian American Writers’ Workshop)
- Solidarity and Kinship: Daphne Palasi Andreades Interviewed by Mary South (Bomb Magazine)
- The Role of Immigrants in the New York City Economy (New York State Comptroller)
- Revisiting Masculinity and Othering in Diasporic Fiction (The Journal of International Women’s Studies)
Guiding Questions from (Baruch College)
- Why do you think the author chose to use a first-person plural (also known as a “collective narrator”) point of view for the book? Does it work for you as a reader? Why or why not? How does this relate to Buddha in the Attic, our April 2020 read? 2 To what extent and in what ways are the experiences of immigrant women distinct from those of their daughters, granddaughters, etc. and from the men in their lives?
- Do you recognize the experiences of any of your friends or family in the characters that the author portrays?
- How is the experience of nostalgia the same and different among first generation immigrants and the generations that follow?
- On page 15, “Musical Chairs” symbolize the swapping of names and misidentification of the characters in the book. “Our teachers call on Nadira but stare at Anjali.” What lesson(s) can you take away from this? How important is a name to an identity?
- How does the setting of Queens, NY, affect the narration of the book?