“‘Brown Girls,’” we say, formally, jutting chins and clearing throats. Sound educated: “‘Brown Girls’ by Daphne Palasi Andreades is about nostalgia, is about inter-generational trauma and immigration, is about racism and sexism and the internalization of both by Brown girls growing up in Queens, New York. ‘Brown Girls’ is about the multiplicity of identities contained in that single signifier, Brown, narrated collectively (“we”), the better to cleave them, the girls, in both senses.“  

We think: But is it? 

We think: This is like Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Virgin Suicides,” but worse because it doesn’t know what it wants, who its characters are, where “we” ends and I begins.  

We think: Isn’t that the point, though?  

Start over.  

“‘Brown Girls,’” we say, “is a chatty novel, written with a local economy of language, a street food syntax — ‘kabobs, lechon, jerk chicken, platanos’ — but filled with an immiseration of ideas.” We say, “The chapters are vignettes, clipped like stops on subway rides out to the ‘dregs of Queens.’ Chapters, here, are stages of life: childhood, high school, college, career, marriage, motherhood; chapters that account for everything, exploring nothing.  

We think: This is prose poetry, 200 pages of beautiful, plodding plotlessness. There are no characters but archetypes. But new archetypes, anything but mere.  Brown girls in endless variation, on the page as they are in life.

We think: This is like Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities,” with its endless stop-starting over. 

We think: We’ve read this all before in 280 characters or less. We think threads and posts.  

Refresh.  

“Brown girls,” we say, “whose cousins, aunts and uncles ‘are nannies and construction workers, cooks and caretakers.’ Brown girls whose teachers misidentify them. Browns girls who are ‘the color of sand,’ ‘soil,’ ‘charcoal pencils,’ ‘hamburger patties.’ Brown girls who play made-up with their sisters’ makeup, pantomiming a paramour on the cover of a romance novel. Brown girls who, scant pages in, ‘grow bored of pretending to be these women,’ who will grow up bored of pretending to be themselves.”  

We think: This early in the novel and so poignant. It won’t hold up, the eloquence, the self-aware prose, but it will try, and we will be thankful. In the age of the tweet, self-conscious language is a gift. 

Awed, we think: This is a novel about every Brown girl ever. 

We think: What did we just read, forgetting.  

Remind yourself.  

“Brown girls,” we say, “who grow up and get out, go to high schools in Manhattan, to Juilliard and magnets. Brown girls who never leave, and the ones who can’t come back, who say ‘I’m fucking outta here!’ Brown girls who have kids too young; or end up in the Ivy Leagues where ‘lawns are perfectly mowed and even the garbage cans shine.’”

“Brown girls,” we say, “know Brown boys who are their brothers, their friends, who become drug dealers, commit crimes, get caught. Brown boys who go to jails and prisons, get stuck.”

We think: Brown girls whose mothers don’t want them dating Brown boys, boys from the block. Brown mothers trying to protect Brown daughters from Brown fates. Brokenhearted.

We think: This is Pew statistics as prose poetry.  

We think: Readers of progressive politics will rejoice. Every sentence in this novel is a post away from a placard, a slogan, is quotable. We think we’re not sure that’s what a novel is meant to be. 

Try again. 

“Brown girls,” we say, “‘Brown girls brown girls brown girls who profess a deep, unshakeable love for these boys who sometimes see them, but mostly don’t,’ who paint their ‘faces lighter, lighter. Until we are the color of lilies. Or bones. There. Beautiful.’ Browns girls who, some of them, grow up and rebel, date white boys, whose parents transform them into ‘Ambassadors of Third World Nations. Their fathers and mothers ask: What do you think is the root cause of poverty in your country?’” 

We think “your country” with outrage. We think like White reviewers, like these Brown girls’ White husbands and wives and spouses whose “anger and indignation will feel merely comical” to them. Because these Brown girls “have always felt rage.” Brown girls who marry White people and dream of Brown men.  

We think: Stereotypes are mnemonic aids for idiots. They flatten and bore. Imagine asking Monet to employ fewer brushstrokes. As if paintings, or people, should only come in primary colors.  

We think, quietly: A monochrome sketch of miscegenation reaffirms stereotypes. We cringe. And then stop, reluctantly wonder.  

“’Brown Girls,’” we say, “we love this novel, an incredible debut novel.” 

We think: We love and hate this novel. 

We think: One more time. 

“’Brown Girls,’” we say, “’brown girls brown girls brown girls,’” summoning someone, getting everyone, variegated and beautiful, all at once. 

We think: Too much is not always enough.