Black Girl Unlimited: The Remarkable Story of Teenage Wizard, by Echo Brown, is a book I found in my 13-year-old’s stash of library books from our last pre-lockdown trip to the library. She admitted she hadn’t read it.

I have been missing having a good book to come back to in between all the “work” reading I’ve been doing, and a YA book was just the ticket.

Brown’s book is gritty, moving, and other-worldly. It introduces ideas about racism and intersectional racism (the additional discrimination Black women experience due to being both female and Black). Brown demonstrates the danger of stereotypes, and the real limitations institutional racism places on people’s lives. There are so many lessons in this book, it’s amazing that there’s also a story in its pages, yet it doesn’t feel tedious or didactic.

There is “older” YA and “younger” YA, and I would group this book in the “older” category. This is real-life content; it rarely feels gratuitous. There is sexual content, drug references, some violence, a lot of colorful language, and triggery stuff for those who have experienced abuse.

Black Girl Unlimited has a magical dimension. This manifests in difference ways, one being several powerful sequences where Brown switches seamlessly back and forth between two parallel stories, drawing them together into an impactful one-two punch of storytelling. Depending on your background, you might see some spiritual warfare in there. I know I did.

The reader is also called to consider White Jesus. White Jesus is a damaging idea, especially since, having been born in the Middle East, Jesus was almost surely brown. We all want our Savior to look like us, but some of us also need him NOT to look like our oppressor.

Brown reminds us that we can’t just share out of our abundance, we also have to open our hearts.

While I was reading Black Girl Unlimited, I came across a quote somewhere on the internet (I’ve linked to the oldest source I could find):

“When you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence.”

Black Girl Unlimited is a story of the lives of people who are, for the most part, being jealously kept away from the abundance that exists in the world.

The gate to that world of abundance is small and heavily guarded. What would happen, how many lives would immeasurably improve, if we tore down the gate and made a bigger table?

Read Black Girl Unlimited, and let me know what you think about the fence/table idea.