Three Girls From Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood
(Simon & Schuster, $27)
Nobody was closer to Dawn Turner when she was growing up than her sister Kim and her friend Debra, said Emma Specter in Vogue.com. Turner eventually became an accomplished journalist and novelist, but Kim and Debra fared far less well. One died of alcoholism at 24; the other murdered a man and was sent to prison. In her “unmissable” new memoir, Turner turns back the clock to mull why three friends from the same 1970s Chicago neighborhood met such varied fates. Because Bronzeville was home to every Black family that arrived during the Great Migration, and because the three girls were children of the civil rights era, her book “functions as a kind of living history, allowing the reader a direct view of what it’s like to inherit a mixed legacy of freedom and continued injustice.”
The chapters of the book “read like self-contained short stories,” said Linda Villarosa in The New York Times. But they’re “woven together into a whole.” Turner wants to convince readers that she was simply the luckiest of the three: Like Debra and Kim, she came of age in a place where wealth and hope were scarce and at a time when opportunities for Black youth were moderately expanding. We see the girls in evocative scenes that hit “all the familiar touchstones of ’70s Black girlhood: Noxzema, training bras, the hot comb on the stove.” But the challenges and potential pitfalls were universal, too.
“The men here are nearly as fascinating as the women,” said Tina McElroy Ansa in The Washington Post. Turner’s father, who was a violent alcoholic, never ceases to be a person she yearns to connect with. But Turner’s mother and other adult women who were crucial to the author’s development are so vivid that their lives and personalities “threaten to eclipse the girls’ tale.” Even so, “this is an exceptional work, a memoir told with honesty, grit, and a sly wit that continually takes readers to unexpected places. It makes one hope that Turner might return to this memoir in 10 or 20 years for a second volume. I’m hooked on these women.”