The Women of Brewster Place: A Novel in Seven Stories (Penguin Contemporary American Fiction Series)

In the 1980s which I still sometimes think was only 20 years ago, I watched the made for tv movie, Women Of Brewster Place. At the time, I paid no attention to the credits, had never heard of Gloria Naylor and had no idea the movie was made from a book. The movie was stuck in my mind all these years and a couple of years ago I decided to go ahead and buy it to re-watch. I finally saw the credits and as the movie was still playing I immediately searched out and ordered a copy of the book. This weekend I finally sat down to read it and it has now sent me on a shopping spree to pick up more of Gloria Naylor's work. This book is about seven Black women who all eventually end up in the run down tenement building of Brewster Place, a building on a dead end street where nothing ever gets fixed. Crime is rampant in the alley and by the wall that cuts them off from the more upscale neighborhood. It is beautifully written and sometimes heart breaking, sometimes hopeful, but never boring. It claims to be short stories, but to me it's more like chapters on each individual woman, and Ben the janitor/caretaker is an important character as well. It's hard for me to talk about the book without talking about the movie. The book is more graphic in certain scenes that would have been too intense for tv in those days, and yet the movie stuck so close to the book as to even include most of the dialogue word for word. It's only near the ending of the book that the movie went a slightly different way. I guess I have to recommend both to you, I loved them equally. 5 out of 5 stars

I remember female classmates telling me that, as a white male, I could never understand this book. In one sense, they were right. I don't read a lot of books by black females. But, in another sense, they were dead wrong. Gloria Naylor gives lie to the notion that authors and readers must be bound by their self-stereotypes and that persons of diverse racial or economic backgrounds cannot understand each other. This book is beautiful.Yes, the majority of characters are black women from the ghetto. But, like true literature, this book isn't really about so select a group. The experiences and feelings of these women are transcendent - transcendent because they are "real" persons first and black women second. For example, Naylor describes the grief a young mother suffers for an infant who has died after sticking its finger into an electric socket. The grief Naylor captures is universal. If mystics have experiences in which they have such joy it makes them feel one with the universe, then Naylor does the same thing here, only with pain.And isn't this what literature is supposed to do: make us understand ourselves better by showing life as someone else, someone who may be 100% different than us? And by gaining a glimpse that perhaps we are not as different from others as we assumed, don't we join the world a little more?

I thought that this book was very intresting. Not a lot of books like this one can grab my attention and hold it but this one did. I saw the movie too. I've seen it about a billion times so when I read the book I basically knew what it was. My favorite character in the book was Lucelia she had the most problems and in my opinion she handled them very well. I know for a fact that if my husband left me,then I got an abortion,and then my only daughter died, that I wouldn't be able to cope with it. I would have to kill myself. But with a little bit of help from Mattie Michael(another great character in the book) she pulled through. My least favorite character was Sophie. She was always in everybodies business but her own. She critized everybody especially Lorraine and Theresa. I think that each characters story is connected by love and families. The authors writing style was great I understood everything. I don't only recommend this book to highschool students I recommend it to anyone who comes across it.

Naylor, like Walker is the best of all the rest. I could have sworn that I knew each and every one of these women. I can't even describe the emotion I felt when I read this book. Naylor captures the basic theme that all women need to adhere to, not just Black women, that is that we as females need to try to start saving ourselves from destruction and stop trying to save everybodyelse because we feel it is somehow our duty to do so. We need to cast down our buckets where we are and start taking control of our lives, and our destinys. I loved this book and I can't wait to read it again, it was just that good.