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When historical fiction and memoir is in the hands of a master, it saturates us with the sounds and scents of a place and it takes us inside the emotional experience of that time. Here are two indelible books for young readers about what it was like to come of age in an immigrant neighborhood in an American city. Jacqueline Woodson’s highly acclaimed and award-winning “Brown Girl Dreaming” is a memoir in verse, but if that sounds like a high bar for your young reader, it’s wonderfully accessible. Woodson tells the story of leaving Ohio, where her father’s family is rooted and moving to South Carolina. “I am born in Ohio,” she writes, “but the stories of South Carolina already run like rivers through my veins.” In the South, her grandmother will teach her how to navigate Jim Crow segregation and the breakup of her parents' marriage. Eventually, Jacqueline and her siblings will be reunited with their mother in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. This is where young Jacqueline comes into her own even as she struggles to adjust. There are short poems about cherished friends and irritating siblings. There are beautiful verses about the tumultuous changes of the civil rights era happening all around her. I hope Sandra Cisneros’ classic “The House on Mango Street” is still read and taught in middle schools because the characters are both approachable and indelible. It draws its richness and authenticity from Cisneros’ own childhood in Chicago. Her parents were from Mexico and the family, six boys and one girl, settled in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. In the book, the family moves to a house that young Esperanza doesn’t like at first. “It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath.” But although Esperanza’s parents assure their kids that the house is temporary, the house and the neighborhood around it will be vital to the young woman Esperanza becomes.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 