A review by serendipitysbooks
Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner

emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.0

 
Three Girls From Bronzeville was the perfect non-fiction book to read after Last Summer on State Street. These two books are very definitely in conversation with each other, with the two groups of girls, one fictional and one real, growing up just two miles and two decades apart.

The three girls in this book are Dawn, her younger sister Kim, and her best friend Debra. As children they played together and dreamed of becoming doctors (Dawn and Debra) and a teacher Kim. But slowly but surely their paths diverged and their futures involved drug use, alcoholism, a teenage pregnancy, failing college, and a murder conviction. In this book the author tries to tease out the pivotal points in each of their lives, when a different outcome or choice might have altered the trajectory of their lives - for better or for worse. While the problems are obvious, the answers and solutions were much less clear cut at the individual level. This book was overly long in places, and the focus not as tight as it could have been. However, the highlights, particularly the minor and major instances of redemption, offered ample reward. 
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