Brown Girl Brownstones Summary

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The novel Brown Girl, Brownstones is a fiction story that is about an immigrant family from the Caribbean country of Barbados and their struggles in America. The story is set in New York during the time between The Great Depression and also World War II and is told in a third person point of view so that the reader, being us, understands different components of the story. The story’s main character is a girl named Selina Boyce and the story is told through the stages of her life from when she was around ten years old up to when she was around her early twenties. Immigration, specifically race, played a large factor in the story, with race hindering opportunity, and different characters coping with race in different ways. (Thesis statement)
In the book Brown Girl, Brownstones different characters handled race differently than others, specifically Selina’s mom and father. (Topic Sentence). Selina and her family lived in America when there was still racism around. Selina’s father, Deighton, is studying accounting in the hopes of him getting a well-paying job even though they are in New York and the people who are in charge of hiring are racist and turn Selina’s dad Deighton away. “…You see this?” He held up the accounting manual. “This gon do it. I’m gon breeze through this course ‘cause I was always good in figures.” “I gon wait till they send the …show more content…

(Topic Sentence) In the book Brown Girl, Brownstones Deighton, the father of the family, is trying to provide for his family and is studying accounting to try to land a job in New York City. His friends and family all tell him not to because the people who were hiring were racist, white people who didn’t want any blacks working for them. Deighton went to apply anyways and the racist white people rejected him in a very rude way. Thus, race played a large role in the story affecting it in many different ways. (Transition

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