Title: Another BrooklynAuthor: Jacqueline Woodson
First Published: August 9, 2016
Publisher: Amistad
Pages: 192
Genre: Coming of Age, Historical Fiction
Format: Hardcover
Source: Library
Rating:
Synopsis:
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.
Buy the Book: AmazonReview
I first encountered Jacqueline Woodson through her bite-sized memoir, Before Her, earlier this year and I was so in love with her prose that I knew I needed to read her other work. I ran to the library and picked up the first one I could, and I was in awe at the beauty of this novel!
Another Brooklyn is a historical fiction book about growing up in 1970s Brooklyn. It is a novel about all the rough edges of adolescence, female friendships, broken families, grief, single parenthood, first love, first heartbreak, and how young girls, especially young black girls, are sexualized. It is about growing up too fast in a country still feeling the aftershocks of the Civil Rights Movement, white flight, and the Vietnam War.
At the start of the novel, August returns home to Brooklyn and all the memories that come with it. The novel is told in a stream of consciousness and reads like a poem. It was so easy for me to get lost in the writing, and the book was hard to put down. It felt like a love letter to her neighborhood, and it was absolutely stunning.
Quote
“When we had finally become friends, when the four of us trusted each other enough to let the world surrounding us into our words, we whispered secrets, side by side by side or sitting cross-legged in our newly tight circle. We opened our mouths and let the stories that had burned nearly to ash in our bellies finally live outside of us.”
Content Warnings
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About Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for adults, children, and adolescents. She is best known for her National Book Award-Winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and her Newbery Honor-winning titles After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way. Her picture books The Day You Begin and The Year We Learned to Fly were NY Times Bestsellers. After serving as the Young People’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, she was named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the Library of Congress for 2018–19. She was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2020. Later that same year, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.
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