"Brown Girl Dreaming" by Jacqueline Woodson

Can't believe it took me so long to read this award-winner, particularly because I count Jacqueline Woodson as one of my top 20 YA authors.  I met her once, a long time ago, and assumed she was much younger than me, given her vibrant energy and youthful demeanor.  She isn't.  According to this book, she is exactly three months older than me.  I've always felt a strange sort of kinship with her, however, through her work.  This autobiographical tale solidified that in many ways.  We were both born into an extraordinary time when the world, particularly in America, was changing very rapidly.  Like me, the history of her family plays an important part in her narrative, and both of us struggled with absent parents.  We listened to the same music on the radio and played the same board games on rainy days.  Our families were similar in make-up although roles are sometimes reversed.  I reacted to my brother's birth much like her brother reacted to her, and I was the bookish older sister who made my younger brother self-conscious with teachers who knew us both.  Ms. Woodson and I both had big gaps between our front teeth, spent time with grandparents bent on the way of faith, and had mothers determined that education would better us.  We are both "the same yet different."  There are real differences, of course.  Jacqueline Woodson is black and spent significant time in the deep south in the 1960s.  Not an easy time, or place, to be different.  She was a tomboy and hated to read and cook, although she enjoyed stories, words, and a good meal.  Her struggles with reading at an early age makes her skill as an award-winning adult writer even more impressive.  That being said, her normally fabulous prose is even more elevated here, where she uses poetry to convey the story.  The sparcity of words makes the message meaningful and striking.  Small haikus on "How to Listen" dot the various sections with strong imagery, while her struggle to find the right words, as a child, are a literary triumph in and of themselves.  The book begins before Jacqueline Woodson begins, with family history, and weaves through the early young years of this talented woman's life.  It isn't so much memory (she couldn't possibly remember some of the tales recounted here, given her age at the time), but rather a tapestry of life and family bonds.  It is a rich tale, a beautiful one, an ordinary one and a profound one.  Once again, Woodson hits the mark with a book fully deserving of the praise piled upon it.  Can't wait to see the "next chapter."  So much of her life is like mine, but I'm curious as to what happened as she grew up and had to deal with being different within her own family dynamics.  In any case, this is a writer with many years ahead.  She will undoubtably continue to enrich us.