Review by New York Times Review
"THIS IS MEMORY" is the refrain of "Another Brooklyn," Jacqueline Woodson's haunting new novel. Woodson, the recipient of four Newbery Honor awards, has written her first adult novel in 20 years, returning to the Brooklyn setting of "Autobiography of a Family Photo" (1995) and her recent award-winning memoir, "Brown Girl Dreaming." These works form a triptych of bildungsromans taking place in the author's hometown and tracking her generation's coming to adulthood. But in "Another Brooklyn," the subject isn't as much girlhood, as the haunting half-life of its memory. August, an Ivy-educated anthropologist, returns home for the funeral of her father. Her scholarly work centers on burial rituals around the world, an attempt to unravel the mystery and pain of loss. Mourning threads through this elegiac tale. August's Brooklyn story begins 20 years earlier, in 1973, when she moves to the borough following the death of her mother. Eleven years old and deep in denial about her mother's fate, August found comfort and acceptance with a clique of girls whose lives wound around one another's in a series of complex knots. "Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone." That word, "beautiful," appears in the text many, many times - to describe August's father, the drug addict next door, lost mothers, random strangers and of course, one of the girls. This insistence is willful, a declaration that despite the blight of the 1970s, the children playing with hypodermic needles like toys, the menace of Child Protective Services and the ever-present threat of pregnancy and sexual abuse, there was beauty, even amazing beauty; the repeated word becoming a defiant, poetic incantation. The late 1960s and 1970s are a turbulent period in American history, and the girls' lives intersect with a range of national and international horrors. The starving children of Biafra, the Son of Sam murders, the great blackout of 1977, all are the setting against which the girls come of age. And the Vietnam War and its domestic reverberations loom large. The battlefield death of her Uncle Clyde hurled her mother into madness. Former vets, hooked on heroin, nod off in corners. August's up-standing and responsible father returns from the war with only eight fingers, a reminder that even if a man comes home alive and sane, he is not whole. Still, it is the personal encounters that form the gorgeous center of this intense, moving novel. The four friends are so close that boundaries between them are blurred and nearly irrelevant. She treasures this closeness even as she feels haunted by her mother's cautionary words about the treachery of women. "She said women weren't to be trusted. Keep your arm out, she said. And keep women a whole other hand away from the farthest tips of your fingernails. She told me to keep my nails long." Her mother's warning looms over the narrative like a witch's curse. FOR NOW, womanhood is a faraway signal, a blinking light, visible, but indecipherable. As August, Angela, Gigi and Sylvia move into adolescence, every kiss feels fraught. Boys are dangerous. They bring with them the possibility of pregnancy, which could cause a girl to be banished "Down South," which is not merely a geographic designation. "We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over single auntie or strict grandmother." Woodson also knows that "Up North" is hardly a promised land. When August and her family first arrived in Brooklyn, white families were moving out, panicked and with sadness, as though they were fleeing a hurricane. "White people we didn't know filled the trucks with their belongings, and in the evenings, we watched them take long looks at the buildings they were leaving, then climb into station wagons and drive away. A pale woman with dark hair covered her face with her hands as she climbed into the passenger side, her shoulders trembling." With this in mind, it's difficult to interpret the meaning of the title. Does "Another Brooklyn" allude to the lost Brooklyn of 1970-90 to which the novel is dedicated? Or maybe "Another Brooklyn" is the secret Brooklyn of girlhood, where young women find strength in the identities they develop together. Referring to the boys of the neighborhood, August observes: "The four of us together weren't something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility." But this strength they find in one another is no match for the grown men who prey on young girls. The girls' soothing words and touches can only salve the eventual injuries. The heartbreak of girlhood isn't that it doesn't last, as an adult August comes to understand. "What is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory." Structured as short vignettes, each reading more like prose poetry than traditional narrative, the novel unfolds as memory does, in burning flashes, thick with detail, unmooring August from her current reality. "When you're 15, pain skips over reason, aims right for the marrow." A boyfriend's dismissive "forget you" feels like a complete spiritual erasure. A teenage jilting is as devastating as the suicide of a friend. But these disappointments are more painful still, layered over the mysterious death of August's mother. Woodson brings the reader so close to her young characters that you can smell the bubble gum on their breath and feel their lips as they brush against your ear. This is both the triumph and challenge of this powerfully insightful novel. "This is memory," we are reminded. But this is also the here and now. There is no time to take a few paces back and enjoy the comforts of hindsight. The present, we are repeatedly reminded, is no balm for the wounds of the past. TAYARI JONES is the author of "Silver Sparrow."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Best-selling and acclaimed children's author Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming, 2014) presents an evocative adult novel. August, her memories stirred by running into a friend after her father's funeral, dives headlong back into episodes from her youth. Suddenly, having lived only in Tennessee, eight-year-old August finds herself in her father's hometown of Brooklyn. Stoic young August is bolstered by the responsibility of watching her brother while their father works, and by the certainty that their mother will soon leave Tennessee, too, and join them. From their third-floor window, August and her brother observe the daily despair of poverty, but more notably the world of liberated, unsupervised youth: the skipping rope, the uncapped hydrant, in short, the kids they wish they were. August can't believe her luck when Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi the very girls she has longed to know befriend her. The foursome entertain, sustain, and strengthen one another as they move through their early teens in the 1970s, their developing bodies just one of many perils. The novel's richness defies its slim page count. In her poet's prose, Woodson not only shows us backward-glancing August attempting to stave off growing up and the pains that betray youth, she also wonders how we dream of a life parallel to the one we're living.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first adult novel in 20 years, acclaimed children's and YA author Woodson (winner of the National Book Award for her last book, Brown Girl Dreaming) combines grit and beauty in a series of stunning vignettes, painting a vivid mural of what it was like to grow up African-American in Brooklyn during the 1970s. When August, an anthropologist who has studied the funeral traditions of different cultures, revisits her old neighborhood after her father's death, her reunion with a brother and a chance encounter with an old friend bring back a flood of childhood memories. Flashbacks depict the isolation she felt moving from rural Tennessee to New York and show how her later years were influenced by the black power movement, nearby street violence, her father's religious conversion, and her mother's haunting absence. August's memories of her Brooklyn companions-a tightly knit group of neighborhood girls-are memorable and profound. There's dancer Angela, who keeps her home life a carefully guarded secret; beautiful Gigi, who loses her innocence too young; and Sylvia, "diamonded over, brilliant," whose strict father wants her to study law. With dreams as varied as their conflicts, the young women confront dangers lurking on the streets, discover first love, and pave paths that will eventually lead them in different directions. Woodson draws on all the senses to trace the milestones in a woman's life and how her early experiences shaped her identity. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Review by Library Journal Review
With spare yet poetic writing, this long-awaited adult novel by National Book Award winner Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) is a series of vignettes narrated by August, shortly after her dad's funeral and a chance encounter with an old friend. Reminiscing about the 1970s leads August to rediscover the nervousness she felt after her dad relocated her and her younger brother to Brooklyn amid a heroin epidemic, and how she always hoped her mom, who is haunted by her own brother Clyde's death in Vietnam, would arrive soon. Forever feeling like an outsider, August unexpectedly found sisterhood with Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi. Woodson movingly chronicles the ups and downs of friendship as the girls discuss everything from their hopes and dreams to their varying shades of blackness. While her dad and brother sought solace in the Quran, August still longed for a sense of belonging. Woodson seamlessly transitions her characters from childhood to adulthood as August looks back on the events that led her to become silent in her teen years, eventually fleeing Brooklyn and the memories of her former friends. VERDICT An evocative portrayal of friendship, love, and loss that will resonate with anyone creating their own identity and will have YA crossover appeal. [See Prepub Alert. 2/8/16.]-Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
When August and her family (minus her mother) move from the quiet of the country to the fast pace and clamor of 1970s Brooklyn, she is accepted by a tight group of friends from the neighborhood. From an adult vantage point, August narrates this memoirlike novel of those years in which school, sex, talent, and family prove to widen or narrow the paths of the young women's futures. Imbued with bittersweet nostalgia and realism. (http://ow.ly/h2xF305MzTe)-Suzanne Gordon, Lanier HS, Gwinnett County, GA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
