Brown Girls

Andreades’s underwhelming debut follows a group of young women of color who grow up in the “dregs of Queens.” Narrated using the first-person plural “we,” the story follows the trajectories of girls who, by age 10, have learned to never talk back, stay quiet in the face of bullying, and accept that the outside world is oblivious to their different shades of brown (more than a dozen of their names are first heard in reference to the teachers’ confusion over who is who: “They call us Khadija, Akanksha, Maribeth, Ximena, Breonna, Cherelle, Thanh, Yoon, Ellen”). At 13, they secretly crush on brown boys (considered “trouble” in their parents’ eyes) and experiment with makeup to make their skin lighter. At 15, they part ways, as some start high school outside of Queens, while others stay near home. At 18, a rift forms as they leave for different colleges and realize that in their home neighborhoods, they must downplay their intelligence and keep their ambitions to themselves. Still, they try to stay in touch as they navigate predominantly white spaces. The prose is often simplistic, and there is little character complexity beyond the women’s contrasting paths. Unfortunately, the first-person-plural narration robs the work of nuance and oversimplifies complex ideas about race and identity. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency. (Jan.)