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The Short Story Brownies By Zz Packer

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Recommended: Racism in american literature

The short story Brownies was a very interesting story to read. The author is ZZ Packer and was written in 2003. The Story is told by a girl named Lauren. She is in a group of African American girls. The other group is Troop 909 and they are a group of white girls. The whole story has a bunch of racial tension in it which leads up to a huge fight at the bathrooms or so we thought. Another girl in the story named Arnetta is the girl that starts it all by saying the white girls called them names based on the color of their skin and that starts the whole dilemma of the 2 groups. Since the story is told by a girl in the African American group you really don't get another point of view from the girls in Troop 909. You only get a view from the other …show more content…

The girls were stuck in the cabins all day because of the stunt they tried to pull the night before. The story ends with the girls on the bus ride how talking about how people would do anything they say because of their religion. In the story Brownies ZZ Packer uses a lot of examples of peer pressure. Arnetta is always trying to talk the girls into doing stuff that is not so good, and if you don't like what she said then she makes fun of you until you say ok with it. Because the story is viewed by a girl in the group. ZZ Packer uses dialogue as a literary element in the story. You really get a feel for how Lauren feel on the inside and see how she acts on the outside. Lauren explains that she doesn’t talk that much because she doesn't want to be called snot.
Another literacy element ZZ Packer uses is hyperbole and example was one of the first sentences of the story when Lauren said “By the second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909.” later on in the story you read that they actually don’t even get into a fight with the girl they just confront them and get in trouble for

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2 Questions of “Brownies” 1. In the short story, “Brownies,” I would describe the narrator, whose name is Laurel, as a shy and timid girl, questioning the way people act. Most of the girls in her group do not take a liking to her, for she says, “[They] already decided their course of action, me being the only impediment” (Packer 847). Moreover, the narrator is very smart because she is skeptical, for she is the only one who questions the girls if they, in fact, heard troop 909 call one of the girls a nigger.

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