By Angelo Ascuasiati

“We touch the masks we’ve learned to wear, gaze into mirrors at our ‘better’ selves… We grasp the edges of our masks and find we cannot tear them from our faces.” Detangling where the projection of the self and where the true self lies is a familiar struggle for people who feel stuck between worlds. For immigrants and their children, who at once embody two cultures, the act of learning to define oneself can either be liberating or confining.

In her debut novel, writer Daphne Palasi Andreades explores what it means to carry generations of culture and identity with you into a society that’s unfamiliar with their origins or meaning. Part love letter and part elegy, “Brown Girls” is a novel that pieces together identities and places to create a collage of what brown girls are, and what they can be. The novel was published by Random House and released in January.

The novel’s protagonist(s) hail from “the dregs of” Queens, just as Andreades herself did. In writing this book Andreades creates a space that explores the beautiful but complex reality of growing up brown in America. Despite its fictionalized nature readers become intimately close to characters who for the most part are never even named.

Andreades recently visited Baruch College, her alma matter, to speak with a journalistic criticism and reviewing class about her debut novel. She touched on how the novel developed slowly into what it is today and how she was encouraged to make unconventional choices with her writing. “From one sentence to the next it could be all these different experiences and I could weave them together in the text,” she said.

There is no traditional main character, and hardly anything resembling an ensemble cast, but the novel closely follows the lives of these Queens-grown brown girls. Andreades describes the book as being written in a “choral” voice. The perspective is the plural first-person, “we.” The stylistic choice creates a novel where the main character stands as a proxy not just for one brown girl, but for the range of lives and personalities that brown girls encompass.

As the plot develops it follows a coming-of-age tale. The readers look into the choices that differentiate and unite brown girls as they grow into young women. From where they choose to attend high school to first loves, each choice creates a different path their lives will follow. Andreades explores self-discovery in a way that pushes the use of “we” to its most extreme applications. It is a wonderfully clever way of symbolizing the unity between brown girls, regardless of how their lives split from each other.

Aside from its perspective, the structure of the book is another effective tool used by Andreades. It is split into eight parts, with each part containing short chapters, or vignettes. The chapter titles are often important to understanding the goal or message of the section, in a way that is similar to poetry. In fact, the writing itself is consciously written in a poetic manner. The book moves forward in a stream of consciousness that flows like water.

Andreades is not the first writer of an immigrant family to draw inspiration from these experiences. “Brown Girls” bears similarities to Ocean Vuong’s “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.” Both are beautifully written pieces that bring readers close enough to see the unpolished reality of its subject matter. Vuong and Andreades both excel in creating whole worlds out of personal experiences. They depict immigrant families that follow very different lives, but that play with structure and prose in equally refreshing ways.

Andreades, however, tells the story in a way that feels unmoored at times. Its lack of defined protagonists creates an effective method of conveying a multitude of emotions and stories all at once, but it leaves an absence of defined personal experiences. The characters miss the idiosyncrasies that often endear us to them. And despite the importance of geography throughout the story, the setting can feel vague. It’s hard to say when exactly things are happening, until Andreades mentions the pandemic.

Her novel addresses certain truths about how the pandemic affected brown communities that are vital to understand. Brown people died disproportionately of Covid, and the brown women on the frontlines of healthcare deserve so much respect for their work. But her introduction of these ideas feels jarring for the reader, who before this was reading through what felt like dreamlike flashbacks.

Ultimately, “Brown Girls” is a novel that stands apart from so many of today’s releases. Its voice and style demand the audience’s complete attention and will have you reading through it almost all in one go. The risks Andreades took in creating a novel of this kind were well worth the rewards of individuality and a reading experience that few books compare to.