Monday, June 7, 2021

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown

 




Black Girl Unlimited is an odd book for me to review because it is at least somewhat autobiographical, even as it very much features elements of magical realism and fantasy (the book features the subtitle "The Remarkable Story of a Teenage Wizard).  But it definitely has those fantastical elements again and a fellow book reviewer's review made me think it would be very much up my alley, as someone who has found himself enjoying YA, especially YA trying to deal with serious issues.  And Black Girl Unlimited very much deals with serious issues such as race, sexism, sexual assault, poverty, and more as it tells the story of a bright black girl from a poor East Side neighborhood growing up and dealing with these issues while almost always trying to stay hopeful and uplifting.  

And Black Girl Unlimited is very good and powerful through its hopeful protagonist....if often extremely excruciating to read.  Echo grows up in a family with a history of child abuse, with drugs, alcohol and family problems consuming her mother and brothers, and yet somehow manages to take all this in for a large part of this book both intelligently and heavily naively, innocent in a way that feels almost improbable - and is incredibly difficult to read for a reader who can see where certain things are going.  But Echo's strong hopeful drive, and her will to try and make things better for everyone around her, makes Black Girl Unlimited far from a grim tale of struggle and instead a really powerful volume that's well worth your time.  

TRIGGER WARNING:  Rape (On Page), Child Sex Abuse (Off Page), Racism, Sexism, Drug Usage, and more.  These issues are dealt with well as part of Echo's story, but are absolutely not shied away from - and honestly Echo's innocence as she encounters them only makes them hit harder.  If you can't handle these things, do NOT read this book.

Note:  I started reading this book in audiobook format, and I honestly don't recommend it.  The book's chapters frequently feature a narrative device in which the book bounces back and forth between two narratives in two different place/times, and the audiobook doesn't do a particularly good job making that clear.  
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Echo Brown is a black girl from the East Side, who underwent the revelation at an early age that she, like her mother, is a wizard.  And so while her mother may wallow in a self destructive spiral due to her past accidental murder of her own mother - and now spend significant time on drugs (crack), alcohol or worse; while her two younger brothers seem lost to the street or juvie at an early age, Echo remains always hopeful.  Echo always knows that her wizarding lessons will guide her forward towards a better life...and might enable her to lift the black veil that covers so many others' lives....particularly her own family.  

But life isn't easy for someone like Echo, someone super book smart and straight laced, but who is still a young girl growing up in a cruel racist, sexist, and unjust world.  So will she really be able to maintain that optimism, and work for the betterment of all she knows, after the world begins to strike back at her?
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Black Girl Unlimited, as an autobiographical-esque tale, naturally is told from a first person perspective.  Nearly every chapter features a lesson that Echo learns as a growing wizard, which also doubles as the title of that chapter ("Building the Perfect Shell", "Killing the Imposter, "Becoming Fearless in Your Pursuits", etc.).  It's a bit formulaic, but it works real well in telling Echo's growing tale as she grows from a little girl to leaving for college by the end of the story.  The book also frequently uses a narrative device in which it tries telling two narratives in two different places/times at the same time, with book ending a paragraph on a word that it then uses to start the next paragraph (after a pause) in the other time & place, so that they seem almost to merge.  It's honestly more confusing than anything really and feels overused (and the audiobook doesn't do a good job making it clear what's happening like the written text does) which is one of the weaker parts of this book.

Not that there are a lot of weak parts, as this book is tremendously powerful as it tells of Echo growing up as a girl up through the end of high school.  Echo is an exceptionally bright girl, getting straight As and winding up at a white school on the west side through middle school due to her clear academic achievements.  She makes a habit of observing everything around her, and is always eagerly anticipating learning more about wizardry or about the world and its possibilities, even as she also is well aware and keenly observes everything going wrong in drug, abuse, and other spirals all around her (with her even suffering child sex abuse as a child).  Her darkest element from the start is merely self-doubt about her own worth, in particular about her own dark appearance, which she has to struggle to overcome.  But she always sees the potential brightness in others however, and it makes her so easy to root for and like....even as it also results in her seeming frequently horribly naive about the things that could happen to her....as the reader can see them coming ahead of time and is horribly unable to prevent them.  

And those things are rough and horrifying to encounter, from her mother and her whole family nearly dying in a fire while in a crack-induced coma, to the aforementioned child abuse, to most significantly, her own rape - the latter of which you will see coming chapters away and will be crying when it happens.  Naturally it happening at an age when Echo is fully aware of how awful it is (as opposed to the child abuse which occurs when she wasn't quite cognizant of what went on) and it's the only thing that truly shakes her for a while from her optimism and drive - and requires the support of her own family and community, coming together in a way they rarely do, to push her past it.  Even then, she comes off afterwards with a natural distrust of men, especially as she notices more often about how how men - especially the black men making noise about racism in the community - don't seem to understand how they fail to respect women and treat them horribly.  

There's more here as well than the above, and Brown manages to write her story such that the magic and real intersect in ways that really convey the messages - and thankfully the book is short enough that its repeated narrative techniques fail to get really grating to take away from it all.  Recommended, if tough to read.

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