Alumna’s Debut Novel ‘Brown Girls’ Makes Top Books for 2022 Lists
January 25, 2022
Baruch alumna Daphne Palasi Andreades is the author of Brown Girls, her debut novel about young women from immigrant communities in Queens.
Daphne Palasi Andreades’ (’15) debut novel, Brown Girls, is garnering rave reviews and also landing on several lists of top “must-read” books for January and the new year.
Brown Girls was included on the Times’ list of recommended books for January; The Guardian’s book highlights for 2022; the Chicago Review of Books‘ must-read January list; Debutiful’s “can’t miss” list for January; inews.co.uk’s best books for 2022; and Nylon.com‘s January book releases. The book was also heralded by VogueIndia and by author/bookseller Emma Straub, and Palasi Andreades was profiled by the Boston Globe, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Electric Literature.
The New York Times reviewer Dwight Garner calls Brown Girls a “fearless novel” and says the author “has put herself immediately on the radar screen” by writing with “economy and freshness.” The book tells the story of young women from immigrant communities in Queens. “Brown Girls achieves immediate liftoff,” Garner writes. The book is published by Penguin Random House.
The author majored in English and psychology at Baruch’s Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and was a fellow in the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence-Program.
At a book launch and reading at PowerHouse Books in Brooklyn, she told her audience that the book started out as a short story for a class at Columbia, where she earned an MFA. She then worked on the novel over the course of nearly four years, supporting herself by taking jobs ranging from working in a bar to teaching pre-K. She completed the book during the pandemic after being furloughed from work during the early shutdown. Initially, she recalled, “I was in despair,” but writing the book “got me through. It kept me sane.”
Asked about her unusual choice to narrate the story in the first-person plural “we” voice, she said she wanted to capture the collective “experiences of second-generation daughters” of various diasporas and immigrant communities in her home borough of Queens.
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