Another Brooklyn
Ratings30
Average rating4
15
Ratings30
Average rating4
A Finalist for the 2016 National Book Award
New York Times Bestseller
A SeattleTimes pick for Summer Reading Roundup 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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Recommend audiobook so you can really hear the beauty in Woodson's writing. Such elegance and beauty on such emotional and occasionally traumatic topics. Teen girlhood so authentically rendered.
4.5 stars. Woodson has just an incredible lyricism, even with her prose. I didn't love this as much as Brown Girl Dreaming, but it is excellent.
This novel just wasn't for me as a reader who needs a plot to follow, or at least a character narrative that progresses from a beginning to end. While there were passages that were beautifully written, I felt like the time I spent reading wasn't satisfying. It might have worked better as a collection of poems for a reader to dip into, rather than expecting a story and not finding it.
This is beautifully written, and very spare–you get to know a lot about these characters without having too much spelled out for you. I, as a reader, would have loved MORE, but I grudgingly acknowledge that's not the kind of book this is.It would be an interesting pairing with Burn Baby Burn since they're both in NYC in the 70s, partly both in the summer of 77, but such different tones.It was also interesting for me because I read and loved Woodson's memoir [b:Brown Girl Dreaming 20821284 Brown Girl Dreaming Jacqueline Woodson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1424308405s/20821284.jpg 39959105], and I know this is fiction but I did keep wanting to make connections to the memoir. (Also...I loved the memoir so much!)
