I read this novel in the early stages of writing Small Joys. It beautifully captures the nostalgia that many millennials feel when reflecting on the era of pop, where every hit seemed to be produced by Timbaland or Darkchild. We have characters who routinely sing “Heartbreaker” at the top of their lungs. Brown Girls is an ode to so many things-to girlhood, to Black and Brownness, to joy-and threading all of this is a love for pop and R&B music: Spice Girls, Destiny’s Child, Aaliyah, and yes, Mariah Carey. Set in Queens, this novel is a striking story told in a chorus of voices, following a group of young women of colour as they navigate life. Quite a few of them also inspired me in my own writing, and creating a world scored with music that felt authentically me. These seven novels unashamedly celebrate the joys of contemporary pop music. So, to see pop music taken seriously in fiction, to have it celebrated and not mocked, always sets my heart alight. For whatever reason, I felt as if my novel and its characters wouldn’t be taken seriously, if it leant too much into this obsession of mine, that it lacked a certain intellectuality. In earlier drafts, it was void of any such references I felt a little embarrassed centering a protagonists interests on something that so often eluded respect. My debut novel, Small Joys, set in 2005, is filled with references to ‘90s and early 2000s pop songs. But the definition I’m going with here is music is a hybrid of pop and R&B. Pop is notoriously nebulous in definition. Before I think about my own life in, let’s say, 2007, I think about Britney Spears’ tribulations and the release of her album Blackout. Pop music has shaped my life to such a significant degree that I often preface stories about my childhood with: “I swear I’m not joking,” before proceeding to tell someone that I measure the timeline of my life in Mariah Carey albums-2005 isn’t simply 2005, it’s the year she released her tenth studio album The Emancipation of Mimi and literally changed my life-to bewildered faces of course.

Small joys elvin james mensah