As August's older self reckons with her formative childhood experiences and struggles to heal in the present, haunting secrets and past trauma come to light. In lyrical bursts of imagistic prose, Woodson gives us the story of lives lived, cutting back and forth between past and present. Now, 20 years later, August has returned to Brooklyn to help her brother bury their father. But, gradually, August found friends: “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.” With such nuanced moments of metaphor as these, Woodson conveys the sweet beauty that lies within the melancholy of August's childhood memories. Mourning the loss of their mother, it was hard for the children to be alone and friendless in a new city. August was 8 years old her younger brother was 4. “The year my mother started hearing voices from her dead brother Clyde, my father moved my own brother and me from our SweetGrove land in Tennessee to Brooklyn,” says August. 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.In her first adult novel in 20 years, National Book Award–winning children’s author Woodson ( Brown Girl Dreaming, 2014, etc.) crafts a haunting coming-of-age story of four best friends in Brooklyn, New York.

A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion. 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.īut 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. 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. The acclaimed New York Times bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers her first adult novel in twenty years.

A Finalist for the 2016 National Book AwardĪ SeattleTimes pick for Summer Reading Roundup 2017

Another brooklyn novel