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Young Adult Fiction. Young Adult Literature. HTML: This program is read by the author "Just brilliant."�??Kirkus Reviews Heavily autobiographical and infused with magical realism, Black Girl Unlimited fearlessly explores the intersections of poverty, sexual violence, depression, racism, and sexism�??all through the arc of a transcendent coming-of-age story for fans of Renee Watson's Piecing Me Together and Ibi Zoboi's American Street. Echo Brown is a wizard from the East Side, where apartments are small and parents suffer addictions to the white rocks. Yet there is magic...everywhere. New portals begin to open when Echo transfers to the rich school on the West Side, and an insightful teacher becomes a pivotal mentor. Each day, Echo travels between two worlds, leaving her brothers, her friends, and a piece of herself behind on the East Side. There are dangers to leaving behind the place that made you. Echo soon realizes there is pain flowing through everyone around her, and a black veil of depression threatens to undo everything she's worked for. Christy Ottaviano Books… (more)
User reviews
At the start, I thought I would love this one, when it seemed the mother was teaching her daughter coping mechanisms through the language of magic and using wizardry as a metaphor for building a strength that can carry you through pain. But then it became clear that the magic isn't just metaphorical here, and then things got weird. In general I'm not a fan of magical realism. It needs to be *very* well done to work at all; otherwise it tends to feel like the author plopped some magic down into their story without explanation or logic, and it always feels jarring and clunky and it takes away from the narrative rather than enhances it. I felt this here, so much so that the story Brown is telling - which is fascinating and otherwise nicely done - suffers to the point of nearly unraveling. There were moments when the magic comes into the plot that really didn't make sense at all to me, as in I honestly lost the thread of the logic of the story for significant chunks of the book. Maybe it would have been easier to follow had I read a print copy and not listened to the audio version, but even so, the magical realism just wasn't woven into the story well enough to work for me.
Brown's story is just so powerful. I love the stylistic choices of going back and forth between moments of time. And I know this is an autobiography, but the magic just feels so real and beautiful. Thank you, Echo Brown, for sharing your story with all the ups and downs. You are a