For the Girls in Your Life: Captivating Classics by Women of Color

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I was in college before I encountered stories of girls like me growing into women I wanted to become. “Becoming a Woman” was the freshman seminar that the registrar enrolled me in at the start of my college years at Emory University back in 2003. This placement was unexpected. But the seminar lottery system, and perhaps the universe, had something else in mind. Frances Smith Foster, PhD, my first Black professor, explained that while the class was open to all students, the reading list was reserved for coming-of-age novels featuring young women of color—which is to say: our unique stories.

Having spent years in the standard English classes of my public high school reading William Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other (white, male) literary “greats,” I had few examples of novels that told stories of people like me. I didn’t yet know it, but I was on the precipice of entering into what would shape me into the woman I am today. Two decades later, those novels still inspire and sustain me—as do some more recent books I’ve read as an adult. In honor of Women’s History Month, I’m sharing my favorite books about girlhood, womanhood, and all the messy territory in between. From raw memoirs to page-turning adventure novels, these titles are required reading—for our daughters, our family friends, our nieces, and ourselves.

Off the Record, by Camryn Garrett

An aspiring journalist, 17-year-old Josie thinks she has secured the assignment of her young life when she wins a contest to write a magazine profile of a famous actor. But she soon realizes that this story is far bigger—and more sinister—than she expected. Her maturity and strength are tested when she’s entrusted with secrets from women who have suffered at the hands of a single, powerful director. Young (and not so young) adult readers alike will be inspired by Josie’s bravery—and absorbed by Garrett’s fast-paced writing.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf by Ntozake Shange

First published in 1975, this play should be recognized as an American classic. Instead, it is likely assigned in only the most progressive of high school classrooms, if at all. Slipping between poetry and prose, it’s broken into several poetic monologues by seven women of color, each named after a different color. Shange explicitly wrote the script as a commentary on the experience of coming of age as an African American girl in America; the play shares stories of sexual assault and violence throughout, yet the beauty of Shange’s prose and the power of these women’s bond makes it a hopeful and energetic read. Perhaps the most moving monologue comes at the end, as all seven of the characters unite in a sisterhood of love and eternal support. This new edition features an introduction by Oprah’s Book Club author Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown, as well as an additional poetic monologue not included in the original.

Brown Girls, by Daphne Palasi Andreades

Unlike so many coming-of-age books that begin and end with the character’s teenage years, this 2022 masterpiece reminds us that we are constantly coming into our own identities, at every age. Andreades brings us into the fold of a close-knit group of female friends, allowing us to grow with them from childhood through the turbulence of adolescence and beyond: into their old age and ultimately their deaths. The central characters begin their lives in similar places: as children, they all live in Queens, New York, all are young women of color, and all have immigrant parents, albeit originating from different parts of the world. But their paths diverge as they grow into womanhood, with some taking more stable professional journeys while others are hindered by the capitalist systems that keep so many women of color in a certain class. A smooth, propulsive, and infinitely relatable read.

Gingerbread, by Helen Oyeyemi

Unapologetically unbelievable—fusing made-up countries with houseplants that communicate—Gingerbread loosely retells the tale of Hansel and Gretel with Black British characters and a modern setting. We are brought into the story by a daughter asking her mother to recount her own coming-of-age adventures in a mystical land, and her eventual journey to England. The tale she weaves features a feudal-ruled homeland bordered by ship-sized shoes, a quest for belonging, the sting of displacement, and the magic nourishment of a family recipe, passed down across generations and continents. While the plot is whimsical, the female relationships at the book’s heart are startlingly real. You will see yourself in these pages.

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

I will always remember Esperanza, the heroine of this novel, who brings us into the daily life of her and her family in their Latinx neighborhood in Chicago. The book takes place over a year, the beginning of which Esperanza is 12 years old and starting to be seen and treated as a young woman, although she is very much still a girl. Rather than reducing Esperanza to a neat representative of her culture, Cisneros allows her to exist in all her fullness, complexity, and contradiction; She is at once proud and embarrassed by her working-class family, empowered and endangered by her emerging sexuality, strengthened by her community and victimized by it. Seeing how a girl like Esperanza is exposed at such a young age makes the reader want to climb into the book and shelter her, yet the book ends with a hopeful tone that perhaps it is the character’s own unique creative talents that will save her after all.

When I Was Puerto Rican, by Esmeralda Santiago

Santiago tells the story of her turbulent family’s life in beautiful, richly diverse Puerto Rico and their journey to claim a new life in New York City. Her longing for the familiar lands of her birth are palpable, as she continues to grow up while navigating poverty pressures, language barriers, and overt racism in mainland America. Knowing who Santiago is today—a wildly successful writer and cultural icon—makes getting to know who she was as a child and adolescent, decades before the professional acclaim, feel like an intimate privilege. Although this book is a memoir, it accomplishes what fiction does best: pulls the reader into a fast-moving plot and richly detailed world.

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