First book of 2023 completed. I'd heard much about this book for years, but never found it in a bookstore or came upon it in person. Then I received it as a gift over the holidays and its first few words were enough to reel me in:

"What she liked was candy buttons, and books, and painted music (deep blue, or delicate silver) and the west sky, so altering, viewed from the steps of the back porch; and dandelions."

Gwendolyn Brooks was a renown poet, and I tend to love novels by poets. It was published in 1953 and is just shy of 200 pages. The novel begins with the titular protagonist, a young Black girl in the Midwest, and each chapter is a window of time into her life as she grows up and navigates adulthood. The prose is beautiful, and the character and her moments of realization are rendered with genuine care. MAUD MARTHA acts as testament to a certain time period in the U.S., and its depictions and understandings reverberate today, for better and worse.