Jacqueline Woodson's 'Another Brooklyn' is a lyrical and poetic novel that follows the life of August as she navigates her coming of age in Brooklyn during the 1970s. The story delves into themes of friendship, family, race, and growing up as a young black woman. Through short vignettes and poetic prose, Woodson weaves a narrative that moves back and forth in time, revealing the complexities of August's memories and experiences growing up in Brooklyn alongside her close friends.
The book captures the essence of female friendship and the challenges faced by August and her friends as they transition from childhood to adolescence in a gritty urban environment. Woodson's writing style is described as spare yet rich, allowing the reader to immerse themselves in the emotions and memories of the characters as they navigate life's joys and struggles in Brooklyn.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Triggers may include themes of mental illness, references to drug addiction, loss of family members, and exposure to violence.
From The Publisher:
A Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award
New York Times Bestseller
A SeattleTimes pick for Summer Reading Roundup 2017
A Bustle Fall Roundup pick for 2017
The acclaimed New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers her first adult novel in twenty years.
Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything-until it wasn't. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant-a part of a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.
Like Louise Meriwether's Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson's Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood-the promise and peril of growing up-and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.
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1 comment(s)
****4.0****
The story starts when August, an anthropologist specialising in death rituals, returns to Brooklyn to look after and bury her father, who dies of Liver Cancer. It's her memories, back and forth, from when she,an 8-year old along with her 4-year old brother and Father relocates to Brooklyn from Tennessee farmhouse. August and her brother faces the problems of sudden relocation and a motherless life. They both console each other that their mother will come
"tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."
“Somehow, my brother and I grew up motherless yet halfway whole. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn, as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.”
The grief of this loss is the core of August's life in Brooklyn, where she finds few more girls like her and they bond instantly. Slowly they grow up and start to see the world with the eyes of teenagers and then adults. They start to see the world as it is and what that is doing to their relationships.
August's father who turns to Islam to drench his sorrow on loss, her drug addict neighbours, her fear of teenage pregnancy, abuse, all these awareness of the realness makes this book wonderful. The want of "another brooklyn" in August makes this book beautiful.
“Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone —adults promising us their own failed future.”
Lyrical , dream like narration. I felt like I am travelling through a childhood, may be mine or may be of someone I knew. It's intensely real and hard but yet very beautiful.
Happy Reading!!!
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Another Brooklyn?
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