How long does it take to read Mama's Girl?
Veronica Chambers
Mama's Girl by Veronica Chambers takes about 3 hours 33 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 3 hours 33 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1996. 194 pages, about 53,350 words.
8 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 5 hours 56 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 3 hours 33 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 13 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Veronica Chambers grew up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, a girl who mastered the whirling helixes of double-dutch jump rope with the same ease and finesse she brought to her schoolwork, her often troubled family life, and the demands of being overachieving and underprivileged. "Until I was ten," she writes, "three things were true. We always had a car. We always had a backyard. And we lived with my father." Hard times set in when Veronica's father quit his job to become a full-time nightclub performer and soon after quit the family, too. The job of raising Veronica and her little brother, Malcolm X Chambers, was left exclusively to her mother, a Panamanian immigrant whose secretary's salary just barely met the needs of her family. From a young age, Veronica understood that the best she could do for her mother was to be a perfect child - to rewrite her Christmas wish lists to her mother's budget, to look after her difficult brother, to get by on her own. More than a family memoir, Mama's Girl gives voice to the first generation of African-Americans to come of age in the post-Civil Rights era.
Subjects: Afro-American women, Biography, Mothers and daughters, Panamanian Americans, Women editors, New york (n.y.), biography
