by Gloria Naylor (Author)
Once the home of poor Irish and Italian immigrants, Brewster Place, a rotting tenement on a dead-end street, now shelters black families. This novel portrays the courage, the fear, and the anguish of some of the women there who hold their families together, trying to make a home. Among them are: Mattie Michael, the matriarch who loses her son to prison; Etta Mae Johnson who tries to trade the 'high life' for marriage with a local preacher; Kiswana Browne who leaves her middle-class family to organize a tenant's union.
Format: Paperback
Pages: 208
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 18 Dec 2000
ISBN 10: 014006690X
ISBN 13: 9780140066906
Naylor creates a completely believable, and very frightening, world of degradation, violence and human - very human - courage and sturdiness. Chicago Sun-Times
Vibrating with undisguised emotion, The Women of Brewster Place springs from the same roots that produces the blues. Like them, [Naylor's] book sings of sorrow proudly borne by black women in America. -The Washington Post