Review submitted by Joanne Shawhan, Zonta Club of Albany
Three girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood by Dawn Turner, 2021, 320 pages, hardback, e-book, and audiobook.
In this memoir, journalist and novelist, Dawn Turner delivers an immersive and often heartbreaking portrait of life in the historic Bronzeville section of Chicago. It offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourish…and others to falter.
They were three Black girls: Dawn, her sister, Kim, younger by three years, and her best friend, Debra who roamed together the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. For a brief, wondrous moment the girls are all giggles and dreams and promises of “friends forever.” And then fate intervenes, first slowly and then dramatically, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There’s heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why?
It’s at once a celebration of sisterhood and friendship, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.
