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Another Brooklyn: A Novel
Summary
Longlisted for the National Book Award
New York Times
BestsellerThe 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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Reviews
Meh! I wasn't too impressed with this book which I listened to. It's a coming of age recollection by one of a group of 4 black girls growing up in Brooklyn. It seemed contradictory and disjointed to me.
Another Brooklyn is being marketed as Jacqueline Woodson's "first adult novel". I was surprised when I picked it up to find that it's a slim 170 pages with plenty of white space. It's brilliant, however.
Traveling back and forth through time and place in a stream of consciousness style, Another Brooklyn tells stories of girlhood and growing up, friendships and loss and memory, through the point of view of a black girl named August. If you've read Woodson's verse memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, you'll find the "voice" of Another Brooklyn very familiar although the story is different. I loved the brief afternoon I spent with this book.
Traveling back and forth through time and place in a stream of consciousness style, Another Brooklyn tells stories of girlhood and growing up, friendships and loss and memory, through the point of view of a black girl named August. If you've read Woodson's verse memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, you'll find the "voice" of Another Brooklyn very familiar although the story is different. I loved the brief afternoon I spent with this book.
What can I say about this? To say it’s engrossing, riveting,fascinating and amazing just doesn’t seem enough. August returns to Brooklyn for her fathers funeral A chance glimpse at a former friend transports August back to the Brooklyn of her childhood and everything that cam with it: poverty, under, a desire to fit in and young love. So much of this resonated with me and brought me back to the Brooklyn of my childhood. Unde4 200 pages it’s a quick read but oh so good.
Loved the language and the way she told the story. Read it in one sitting.
Another beautiful, brilliant, and heart-touching book from Woodson, bringing the friendship of young women on the brink of emerging into the larger world right up off the page and into the light. Even though my growing-up situation was so different from that of a motherless black girl in 1970's Brooklyn, there are moments in this book that I remember... I don't want to call it a coming of age story. It's about being an age...8, 11, 14... just being and seeing from that spot on your life line. "This is memory" August says over and over, but it feels like now, as if there has been no fading or embellishment or nostalgic softening of the edges as she tells her story.Review written October 2017
This book is quite literally a dream: a memoir of coming of age in 1970s Brooklyn. Full of recollections from a childhood in NYC which was both magical and dangerous, and a friendship between four young women as they travel the road together.
The story is about coming of age in Brooklyn in the 1970s. Woodson writes about teenagers with a rare astuteness. An exceptional book, beautifully written in delicately spare prose.
Short vignettes out of the life of August as she adjusts to moving to Brooklyn from Tennessee. She tells of herself and her three friends as they grow up and grow apart. I am not sure what I feel about this book. It is an interesting writing style. I liked the short vignette style but do not feel I got the whole tale of what was happening. I was glad I read this for book club as I had questions on how life turned out for some of the girls. I will read more of her
A beautiful, spare account of a young Black woman's girlhood in Brooklyn, Woodson's story skips ahead and behind much the way a memory does. Her story is an unflinching examination of sexism, class ,religion, family, place, and race, feeling personal without being judgmental or emblematic. Woodson's masterful prose slices right to the heart of her character's story, and her light touch allows each character space to feel real without investing dense amounts of prose. This book is a small treasure of a life, encapsulating the heart of Brooklyn's culture without resorting to sentimentality.
Another Brooklyn The story is good, but it's really the writing that makes it magnificent.
The book is written in a wistful sort of way and kind of rambles sometimes and keeps the reader in that feeling of being in her stream of consciousness. Its poetic in the way that it discusses some of the harder topics, like the denial we can experience in childhood about what's going on in the world or that hides truths we can't handle yet. I loved the way her mind wandered sometimes from one thing to another and how it effected the way that she remembered things.
Most of all, I love that it was a true story of the lives of girls. Each girl is different, but they all go through those things that all girls go through. They deal with those things that we deal with and Woodson uses that poetic style to include these things without dwelling on them or having to describe them in unnecessary detail. Her writing lets you really feel the story in a way that is unusual. I appreciate writing in a way that walks the reading through that feeling of things we remember rather than life as it happens. I also enjoyed this way of writing with The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness.
The path of each girl wasn't unexpected, though I didn't know which would go which way and there were several others to choose from. This is just the way of things, down to the ways they drifted together and apart. This will be one of those books that could easily be used to describe the way of life at the time it is set. I wouldn't even say specifically for the place that it was set because the lives of the girls are relatable to just about every group of girls I've ever known. It's late 20th century America in the city. There are some truths that may keep it out of high school classrooms, but I could easily see it brought into the college American Literature class. I would certainly use it. This and her memoir written in poetry, Brown Girl Dreaming.
The book is written in a wistful sort of way and kind of rambles sometimes and keeps the reader in that feeling of being in her stream of consciousness. Its poetic in the way that it discusses some of the harder topics, like the denial we can experience in childhood about what's going on in the world or that hides truths we can't handle yet. I loved the way her mind wandered sometimes from one thing to another and how it effected the way that she remembered things.
Most of all, I love that it was a true story of the lives of girls. Each girl is different, but they all go through those things that all girls go through. They deal with those things that we deal with and Woodson uses that poetic style to include these things without dwelling on them or having to describe them in unnecessary detail. Her writing lets you really feel the story in a way that is unusual. I appreciate writing in a way that walks the reading through that feeling of things we remember rather than life as it happens. I also enjoyed this way of writing with The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness.
The path of each girl wasn't unexpected, though I didn't know which would go which way and there were several others to choose from. This is just the way of things, down to the ways they drifted together and apart. This will be one of those books that could easily be used to describe the way of life at the time it is set. I wouldn't even say specifically for the place that it was set because the lives of the girls are relatable to just about every group of girls I've ever known. It's late 20th century America in the city. There are some truths that may keep it out of high school classrooms, but I could easily see it brought into the college American Literature class. I would certainly use it. This and her memoir written in poetry, Brown Girl Dreaming.
A chance encounter with a friend from her youth raises memories of the time in the seventies when August and her girlfriends were becoming women in Brooklyn. The novel explores the different fate of each young woman, and the bonds of female friendship, enduring, and broken.
This was a slender little book and a quick read but I loved every minute of it. It was a joy to read. The writer brings you into the inner circle of the four girls navigating the hazards of Brooklyn in the 70's as they become teenagers.
Jacqueline Woodson has a unique way with words that keeps readers enthralled. in Another Brooklyn she describes her transition from SweetGrove, Tennessee to Brooklyn, New York after her mother's mental collapse on the death of her brother. It was a whole new world from the freedom of the land to the confines of an apartment. However, gradually her father let her roam outside and she made 'life long' friends, which we all know never really lasts throughout life.Another Brooklyn is an extremely well written novel which could very well have been an autobiography.
August, Gigi, Sylvia and Angela. As preteens growing up in Brooklyn, these black girls were inseparable, but eventually they went their separate ways. After her father's death, August reflects back on their friendship and her childhood.Woods's spare prose belies the complexity of this novel. Written in short vignettes, almost dreamlike in memory and weaving back and forth in time slowly revealing August's story, the novel has a rhythm all its own. It's easy to read in a sitting or two, yet will stay with me for a long time.
Fictional, fragmented memoirs of young African American woman transplanted from TN to Brooklyn. Easy hurricane reading, but too loose a tale for me.
This short novel is the reminiscences of the narrator August reflecting on her childhood in 1970s Brooklyn. It's a period piece that recreates a place and time so different from the Brooklyn of today, and very specifically the challenges of joys of being an African-American girl in that place and time. It's also a meditation on friendship, as August recalls the tight relationships with her friends Gigi, Angela, and Sylvia, friendships that at the time seemed permanent but have long since faded away. The book is permeated with a nostalgic sense of loss, and is a poetic rumination of the more complex themes underlying everyday childhood.
I love the authors writing style.Memories...
Long a fan of this author, I've read almost every book published. There is no difficulty understanding why this book was a Nation Book Award Finalist.Free style and lyrical, Autumn (named for the month she was born), takes us back to Brooklyn to bury her father. And, as she goes through the process of going back to the apartment to go through his objects, her memories flash and float along.Moving from the south with her father and brother, she longed to know more about the mother left behind. This is a common thread woven throughout the story. The longing for her mother never ends.Living in Brooklyn in a touch neighborhood when men hid under steps to grab girls after their latest heroin fix, as children yelled in the streets as they ran after the Mister Softee ice cream truck, and girls tried to hold on their their virginity as long as possible.This is a story of growing up in Bronx in the 70's with three close friends. Hoping their differences would not divide them and a future was theirs. Now grown with a Ivy league degree, she made it out of Brooklyn, only to return now and resurrect memories that are both sad and happy.
Brown girl dreaming was the first book I read of Woodsons, also the first book I read in the poetry, prose style of writing in which that book was written. I found that book incredibly touching and though this book is written in a narrative, I found this one equally touching. This author has a way of expression that is recognizably hers, her words flow, almost like music on a page, beautiful music. Another young girl, named August, but this time she leaves the South with her father and younger brother. They come. to Brooklyn, live in an apartment building where they struggle to adjust without their mother. For the longest time we are only treated to glimpses of exactly what happened to her. August, will be greatly aided by the friendship of three other girls. Together they will weather the pre teen years, the storm that is the teenage years and each will experience losses that will irrevocably change them in different ways. Young friendships, hopes and dreams, drugs, white flight, the Muslim religion, sexuality and its consequences are all explored in this short novel. August is a wonderful narrator, her joy, pain and anguish shine through her thoughts and words as she fights to understand the world she inhabits as a young black youth.Stirring, and wonderfully written, this is another unforgettable story written by this amazing author. ARC from publisher.
This is a beautiful short novel of girls' coming of age, of grown up poor in the 1960s, of finding oneself and finding one's pride. After moving from Tennessee to Brooklyn with her father and younger brother, 8-year-old August befriends three other girls and learns about love, loyalty, ambition, sex, and the power of memory to mold our stories of ourselves. Lyrical and lovely, this confirms for me that I will read anything Jacqueline Woodson writes.
Jacqueline Woodson is a brilliant writer. This is a story that explores the bonds and heartbreak of family; the love, limits and pain of friendship; and how a girl grows into womanhood.
A coming of age story set in Brooklyn in the 1970s. August moves to Brooklyn with her father and her brother. She misses her mother and is uncertain how to make her way in a new place. But she makes friends of the sort who create both the fore and ground of her life. This is their story as much as hers. This book is written as a series of memories, and that is clear not only because we first meet an adult August who has returned to Brooklyn. Her memories are told as memories occur, with some crystal clear details popping through a haze of events and emotions that are no longer clear, but that are a part of August nonetheless.
I loved this beautifully written story of four pre-teen girls, August, Sylvia, Angela and Gigi coming of age in the mid '70's. The story is told from the vantage point of August. When her mother has mental health issues, August and her brother are uprooted from their Tennessee farm by their father and move to Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn is not an easy place to grow up. Drugs, murder and prostitution affect the girls on a daily basis. Their home lives are not at all ideal and even their friendship suffers from betrayal. The story follows them to adulthood and reveals the path that each as taken.I especially liked the references made to songs of the 70's, Rock the Boat, Minnie Riperton and Al Green, they all added to the authenticity of the era. Highly recommended.
Jacqueline Woodson's latest novel, which was chosen as a finalist for this year's National Book Award for Fiction, is narrated by August, an African American woman of 35 who returns to Brooklyn after the death of her father. She revisits her teenage years in the mid 1970s spent there in the company of her father, younger brother, and especially the three girlfriends who meant as much to her as anyone else during that time. Each girl had a unique background, and brought a different aspect to their shared relationship: August came from rural Tennessee, Gigi from South Carolina, and Sylvia from Martinique, with Angela, the most streetwise of the four, being the only one who was born in Brooklyn. Their families were also quite different, although each one struggled to survive in the increasingly dangerous streets of that troubled borough, which were plagued by heroin addicts, prostitutes, and gangs, as white residents fled their neighborhoods and rented their homes to anyone who could pay a deposit and one month's rent.The girls' experiences match the changes and increasing danger in their neighborhood, as their developing bodies and sexuality put them at greater risk by predatory boys and men who wish to claim their innocence and derail their promising futures.The novel consists of short paragraphs, narrated in the first person by August, with evocative descriptions of the city and the music of the time that somewhat reminded me of my own considerably less troubled childhood living in nearby Jersey City in the early 1970s, particularly when August mentions her Close 'N Play record player, which I received as a birthday present in 1969.Another Brooklyn is another solid effort by Woodson, whose previous young adult novel Brown Girl Dreaming won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2014. Although I wasn't moved as much by her latest work, it was still a memorable read, which I would highly recommend to everyone.
This novel follows August after her father moves she and her brother from rural Tennessee to Brooklyn, where he grew up. Unused to the city, they stare down from their windows. Later, she makes 3 great friends, and they spend their tween and young teen years as 4 inseperable black girls. Despite their different backgrounds (parental status, origin, attention at home) and their different dreams, they stick together.Decades later, August runs into Sylvia in the subway. The chance meeting brings all the memories of what happened to them (and other young poor-ish black girls in Brooklyn) as they came into their mid-teens.
A lyrical short novel, about a young teenage girl coming of age after moving with her father & brother from Tennessee to Brooklyn, NY. The beauty of this book is the way in which Woodson allows the unspoken words to do most of the talking. It's a story of forgotten memories and of new memories. While I was not as blown away by this book as many have been, it does become richer after allowing it to settle in my mind for a while.
This is a very brief book, as was Brown Girl Dreaming, but just as rich and lyrical and beautiful. Filled with pain and hope and triumph and failure and life. I came away understanding a little more about 1970's Bushwick. Not just the bad parts, which are well documented, and much of which I saw when I worked there for Literacy Volunteers in the 80's, but also the beautiful parts. The very few words about the neighbor who braided her hair, whose son had died in Vietnam and who committed herself to the most patriotic form of grief and outreach touched me deep. My lord this woman can write!
This book made the 2016 National Book Award longlist for 2016. It's not a long book, but Ms. Woodson packs a lot into the 96 pages or so. It's about growing up as a young black girl in 1970's Brooklyn. August and her three friends Sylvia, Gigi, and Angela walk together around the streets of Brooklyn; together always and forever they think. The girls thought that they were invicicible, beautiful and could conquer all, but underneath that childhood veneer there is another Brooklyn - a seedy underworld of drugs, prostitution, starvation and want. It was very easy to get lost inside Ms. Woodson 1970's world. She transports you body and soul back to her time and place. This is a coming-of-age novel like none other.
2.5 stars
Another Brooklyn tells the story of a woman coming home to Brooklyn as an adult due to a tragedy. She then begins reminiscing about the defining moments of her youth, the good and the bad.
The story is relayed in stream of consciousness, a format that I tend to avoid at all costs because I prefer chronological order, but I finished the book because it's short. With this format there are no quotation marks but the dialogue is italicized. It's not like a regular novel; you only get small slices of a much larger story that could have been more compelling than it actually is.
Just as I expected I wasn't left satisfied in the end, mainly because the various subjects that come up are barely explored in this format. I couldn't really feel what the narrator was going through. Overall it's a quick and easy read but not particularly robust or engaging.
Another Brooklyn tells the story of a woman coming home to Brooklyn as an adult due to a tragedy. She then begins reminiscing about the defining moments of her youth, the good and the bad.
The story is relayed in stream of consciousness, a format that I tend to avoid at all costs because I prefer chronological order, but I finished the book because it's short. With this format there are no quotation marks but the dialogue is italicized. It's not like a regular novel; you only get small slices of a much larger story that could have been more compelling than it actually is.
Just as I expected I wasn't left satisfied in the end, mainly because the various subjects that come up are barely explored in this format. I couldn't really feel what the narrator was going through. Overall it's a quick and easy read but not particularly robust or engaging.
How does she do it? In less than 200 pages, Jacqueline Wilson has painted an evocative portrait of a young woman coming of age in Bushwick in the 1970s. The setting, the people, and the emotions were all so vivid; I felt transported back to that place and time. At the center of the novel is August, born in Tennessee and now living with her father and brother in Brooklyn.Somehow, my brother and I grew up motherless yet halfway whole. My brother had the faith my father brought him to, and for a long time, I had 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 saying, "Here. Help me carry this."For a long time, August watches Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi from her window, but one day she is accepted into their social circle. Every one of them wants to give the impression of having it all together, when in reality each girl is faced with family issues, economic issues, or both. They journey together into their teens, their sexuality emerging and presenting still more issues to grapple with. They support one another, and they work against one another, too -- again, Woodson brilliantly captures the power of female friendship. Her writing is sublime. Just read this book and let it wash over you.