Another Brooklyn: A Moving Coming-of-Age Novel of Friendship and Memories Set in the Heart of Brooklyn
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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Community Reviews
170 pages
What’s it about?
This novel looks back in time to Brooklyn in the 1970's. August is a young girl living with her father and her brother and slowly figuring out that her mother may not be coming back. August is one of four friends and they mean everything to each other. As they grow up and move apart we see a story of two Brooklyn’s.
What did it make me think about?
I was amazed at the beautiful prose in this book. The writing is incredible. I gather that Ms. Woodson has written for the young adult audience for a number of years. I am so glad she is writing for the rest of us as well.
Should I read it?
This book is more like a long short story. It is so fast and so beautifully written that I highly recommend it. Just find a couple of hours and you will finish this book in one sitting.
Quote-
“Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone- adults promising us their own failed futures. I was bright enough to teach, my father said, even as my dream of stepping into Sylvia’s skin included one day being a lawyer. Angela’s mom had draped the dream of dancing over her. And Gigi, above to imitate every one of us, could step inside anyone she wanted to be, close her eyes, and be gone. Close her eyes and be anywhere.”
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