The novel centers on Francie Nolan, a young Irish girl in the slums of Williamsburg in the early 1900s. For most of its existence, it was a borough of immigrants, crumbling and ignored, and everyone in it longed to get out.
#Age of rebellion books full#
It’s hard to imagine now that there was once a Brooklyn where a tree struggling to grow on the street was a metaphor for a young woman’s desire to branch out and be a full person, but Brooklyn wasn’t always the built up, hipster, intellectual, wealthy enclave it is now. It’s just that Bambara gives them the space to become fully realized people filled with longing and romance and curiosity and poetry. But these characters are not living in some kind of fictional American utopia either. None of the horrific things black girls are often subjected to in literature happens here. Here’s another key thing: Nothing bad happens to the women in this collection. The whimsical and wild Kit spends a summer hanging out on her tenement’s fire escape, falling for and losing her first love, all the while refusing to stop “singing her own song.”Īll of these girls speak in the language of Harlem of the time - the dialect, the pulse, the toughness.
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Sylvia can fart with her armpits and is the fastest runner in her public school and curses like a sailor and is all sorts of charming and wonderful and crass and observant. Hazel speaks her mind and doesn’t pull punches. The characters in this collection are self-possessed, whip smart, New York City kids. It’s a triumphant short story collection that centers on a few African American girls and women in Harlem and North Carolina in the 1960s. None of them could exist without the city in which they take place. Some are joyous, some nostalgic, some heartbreaking, some angry. Here are a few of my favorites featuring kids or young adults coming of age in cities. The best coming of age novels detail the moral, philosophical, and sometimes poetic journey of one character as he or she grows, while at the same time illuminate something important about the time and place in which the character lives. New York is her mood ring: dirty, dingy and depressing when she’s down beautiful, hopeful, and alive when she’s up. Because of the incredible variety of life in New York, she’s able to use the city’s atmosphere to help express the roiling emotions she is grappling with at any particular moment. Her development as a character has as much to do with what she observes in New York as the choices she makes in her life and her relationship with other characters.
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In my novel The Falconer, 17-year-old Lucy Adler hurtles through early 1990s New York during her senior year of high school, allowing all she sees and experiences to shape her world view - the drugs, the sex, the injustices, the art, the energy, the homelessness, the money, the music, the inequality.