My friend recommended Brown Girls for our sapphic book club. A different book club of theirs discussed it, and my friend wanted more. After reading Palsai Andreades’ debut work, I see what my friend meant. There’s so much to unpack!

Brown Girls is at once the story of a specific friend group and the cyclical story of female immigrant American generations. Though it has paragraphs, chapters, and other novel structures, it reads like a very long prose poem, as told by a Greek chorus of brown women from Queens, New York City. Over the course of the novel, Palasi Andreades creates a wide-eyed memoir of a collective life experience, following her characters through childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and their mid-30s.

For all the joy found in their friendship, the overall tone of Brown Girls was quite bleak. The crosshairs of sexism, racism, and classism weigh heavy on the narrative and are inescapable. Homophobia raises its ugly head to a lesser extent, and I appreciated the note that some people don’t remain women. The seemingly inescapable class miscommunication devastated my heart. Our book club discussed a lot how fraught relationships between working class and middle/wealthy class friends can be. Overall, Brown Girls was very eye-opening for me, as a white person more than two generations within America. Though I hesitant to call it “plot” or “story beats,” I recognized threads of (Q)PoC’s common experiences I’d seen elsewhere, but Palsai Andreades compiles them in one linear narrative.

My biggest critique with the book is the abrupt ending. After having children, the characters immediately age into senility and death. We miss out on the rich years of middle age—that invigorating span when a person figures out what they like and do it on purpose. Heck, none of them get to retire, much less flop on a beach with a margarita. I pointed this out to my book club, and they suggested that perhaps Palsai Andreades didn’t want to discuss middle age because she’s not middle aged yet. Outside the story, capitalism may not let these women retire, and there’s the sad truth that many women of color die younger than their white counterparts. Minority stress is killer. Another point is that, after the original cast have children, the cycle of “brown girls” begins again. In other words, the daughters are the new generation of brown girls. While these are valid points, the text presents and packages itself as the full brown girl experience. I maintain that there could be more in the text that indicated Brown Girls covers less than half a life.

My critique doesn’t erase that Brown Girls is an important, meaningful mirror up to reality. It’s a beautiful, poignant book, which will have you giggling and crying in turn. Everyone should read it.