Brown Girl, Brownstones

Brown Girl, Brownstones is the first novel by the American writer Paule Marshall, published in 1959.

The book is set in a brownstone house in Brooklyn in the 1930s and after, among a community of immigrants from Barbados. Selina Boyce is ten when the novel begins, living with her mother Silla, her father Deighton and her older sister Ina in a house her mother is saving to buy. Silla works relentlessly and expects her daughters to be educated and to rise; Deighton is easy-going, unfaithful, and holds on to the idea of returning to Barbados, especially after he inherits a piece of land there. Selina is the one who has to decide which of her parents' ambitions to take up, and the novel follows her into her twenties as she becomes a dancer and works out what the name Boyce means to her.

Marshall's novel is one of the first books by an African American woman about Caribbean immigrant life in New York, and it was brought back into print by the Feminist Press in 1981.