AUGUST 2016 - AudioFile
A slow jazz interlude sets the tone for Robin Miles’s performance of this long-awaited new novel for adults by children’s author Jacqueline Woodson. As August’s father dies, she takes time away from studying funeral traditions around the world to come home. Returning brings myriad memories of “growing up ‘Girl’ in Brooklyn” in the 1970s—a time when the borough seemed idyllic to her and her three girlfriends but, in looking back, she now realizes was full of threats to the innocent. Miles’s rich voice embraces dialects, accents, and moods as August’s thoughts float back and forth in time, remembering childhood and adolescent experiences. Miles illuminates the novel’s themes, celebrating Woodson’s lines as if they were fine jazz improvisations. S.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
The New York Times Book Review - Tayari Jones
…haunting…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…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…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.
Publishers Weekly
★ 04/11/2016
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.)
From the Publisher
Woodson’s unsparing story of a girl becoming a woman recalls some of the genre’s all-time greats: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Bluest Eye and especially, with its darkly poetic language, The House on Mango Street.” — Sarah Begley, Time
“An engrossing novel about friendship, race, the magic of place and the relentlessness of change.” — People Magazine
“Woodson manages to remember what cannot be documented, to suggest what cannot be said. Another Brooklyn is another name for poetry.” — Washington Post
“Woodson does for young black girls what short story master Alice Munroe does for poor rural ones: She imbues their everyday lives with significance.” — Elle
“In Jacqueline Woodson’s soaring choral poem of a novel…four young friends…navigate the perils of adolescence, mean streets, and haunted memory in 1970s Brooklyn, all while dreaming of escape.” — Vanity Fair
“Another Brooklyn joins the tradition of studying female friendships and the families we create when our own isn’t enough, like that of Toni Morrison’s Sula, Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. Woodson uses her expertise at portraying the lives of children to explore the power of memory, death and friendship. — Los Angeles Times Book Review
“…it is the personal encounters that form the gorgeous center of this intense, moving novel...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...” — New York Times Book Review
“With Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson has delivered a love letter to loss, girlhood, and home. It is a lyrical, haunting exploration of family, memory, and other ties that bind us to one another and the world.” — Boston Globe
“Woodson writes lyrically about what it means to be a girl in America, and what it means to be black in America. Each sentence is taut with potential energy, but the story never bursts into tragic flames; it stays strong and subtle throughout.” — Huffington Post
“Gorgeously written and moving, Another Brooklyn is an examination of the complexities of youth and adolescence, loss, friendship, family, race, and religion.” — Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed
“[E]ntwined coming-of-age narratives-lost mothers, wounded war vets, nodding junkies, menacing streetscapes-are starkly realistic, yet brim with moments of pure poetry.” — Elle Books Feature
“…fine-cadenced prose…” — Wall Street Journal
“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.” — Booklist (Starred Review)
“Another Brooklyn reads like a love song to girlhood…” — Bustle
“emotionally resonant work” — Seattle Times
“Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is a gauzy, lyrical fever dream of a book.” — Vox Magazine
“There are nothrowaway sentences in Another Brooklyn — each short, poetic line feels carefully loved and polished. The first half of this novel asks urgent questions; the second delivers uneasy, heartbreaking answers. At its core, this book is about fragility, how light shines in the broken places.” — Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
“Jacqueline Woodson is a gorgeous writer…lyrical prose, really, really beautiful.” — Emma Straub, New York Times Bestselling author of Modern Lovers and The Vacationers
‘’…And Sister Jacqueline Woodson comes singing memory. Her words like summer lightning get caught in my throat and I draw her up from southern roots to a Brooklyn of a thousand names, where she and her three ‘sisters’ learn to navigate a new season. A new herstory. Everywhere I turn, my dear Sister Jacqueline, I hear your words, a wild sea pausing in the wind. And I sing…” — Sister Sonia Sanchez
“Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is another kind of book, another kind of beautiful, a lyrical, hallucinatory, heartbreaking, and powerful novel. Every gorgeous page leads to another revelation, another poignant event or memory. This is an incredible and memorable book.” — Edwidge Danticat, author of Claire of the Sea Light
“Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is another kind of book, another kind of beautiful, a lyrical, hallucinatory, heartbreaking, and powerful novel. Every gorgeous page leads to another revelation, another poignant event or memory. This is an incredible and memorable book.” — Ann Patchett, New York Times Bestselling Author of This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage and State of Wonder
“In this elegant and moving novel, Jacqueline Woodson explores the beauty and burden of growing up girl in 1970’s Brooklyn through the lens of one unforgettable narrator. The guarded hopes and whispered fears that August and her girlfriends share left me thinking about the limits and rewards of friendship well after the novel’s end. Full of moments of grief, grace, and wonder, Another Brooklyn proves that Jacqueline Woodson is a master storyteller.” — Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, a finalist for the National Book Award
“Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is a wonder. With a poet’s soul and a poet’s eye for image and ear for lyrical language, Woodson delivers a moving meditation on girlhood, love, loss, hurt, friendship, family, faith, longing, and desire. This novel is a love letter to a place, an era, and a group of young women that we’ve never seen depicted quite this way or this tenderly. Woodson has created an unforgettable, entrancing narrator in August. I’ll go anywhere she leads me.” — Naomi Jackson, author of The Star Side of Bird Hill
“Jacqueline Woodson’s spare, emphatic novel about young women growing up in 1970s Bushwick brings some of our deepest silences-about danger, loss, and black girls’ coming of age-into powerful lyric speech. Another Brooklyn is heartbreaking and restorative, a gorgeous and generous paean to all we must leave behind on the path to becoming ourselves.” — Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of Life on Mars and Ordinary Light
“A stunning achievement from one of the quietly great masters of our time.” — Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
“Woodson…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…Woodson draws on all the senses to trace the milestones in a woman’s life and how her early experiences shaped her identity.” — Publishers Weekly, (Boxed and Starred 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.” — Library Journal (starred review)
“Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Woodson’s background not only as a novelist but also as a poet, Another Brooklyn is told in spare, lyrical prose, with a surface simplicity that belies its underlying narrative strength and emotional heft. Often, in Woodson’s novel, what isn’t said is as essential as what is, and readers come away feeling as if they, in the process of reading the novel, are somehow partners in Woodson’s project of telling her poignant and devastating story about dreams deferred, destroyed, and—in rare cases—realized.” — BookBrowser Review
People Magazine
An engrossing novel about friendship, race, the magic of place and the relentlessness of change.
New York Times Book Review
…it is the personal encounters that form the gorgeous center of this intense, moving novel...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...
Boston Globe
With Another Brooklyn, Jacqueline Woodson has delivered a love letter to loss, girlhood, and home. It is a lyrical, haunting exploration of family, memory, and other ties that bind us to one another and the world.
Elle
Woodson does for young black girls what short story master Alice Munroe does for poor rural ones: She imbues their everyday lives with significance.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Another Brooklyn joins the tradition of studying female friendships and the families we create when our own isn’t enough, like that of Toni Morrison’s Sula, Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. Woodson uses her expertise at portraying the lives of children to explore the power of memory, death and friendship.
Washington Post
Woodson manages to remember what cannot be documented, to suggest what cannot be said. Another Brooklyn is another name for poetry.
Vanity Fair
In Jacqueline Woodson’s soaring choral poem of a novel…four young friends…navigate the perils of adolescence, mean streets, and haunted memory in 1970s Brooklyn, all while dreaming of escape.
Huffington Post
Woodson writes lyrically about what it means to be a girl in America, and what it means to be black in America. Each sentence is taut with potential energy, but the story never bursts into tragic flames; it stays strong and subtle throughout.
Sarah Begley
Woodson’s unsparing story of a girl becoming a woman recalls some of the genre’s all-time greats: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Bluest Eye and especially, with its darkly poetic language, The House on Mango Street.
Jarry Lee
Gorgeously written and moving, Another Brooklyn is an examination of the complexities of youth and adolescence, loss, friendship, family, race, and religion.
Washington Post
Woodson manages to remember what cannot be documented, to suggest what cannot be said. Another Brooklyn is another name for poetry.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Another Brooklyn joins the tradition of studying female friendships and the families we create when our own isn’t enough, like that of Toni Morrison’s Sula, Tayari Jones’ Silver Sparrow and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. Woodson uses her expertise at portraying the lives of children to explore the power of memory, death and friendship.
Bustle
Another Brooklyn reads like a love song to girlhood…
Vox Magazine
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is a gauzy, lyrical fever dream of a book.
Ann Patchett
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is another kind of book, another kind of beautiful, a lyrical, hallucinatory, heartbreaking, and powerful novel. Every gorgeous page leads to another revelation, another poignant event or memory. This is an incredible and memorable book.
Elle Books Feature
[E]ntwined coming-of-age narratives-lost mothers, wounded war vets, nodding junkies, menacing streetscapes-are starkly realistic, yet brim with moments of pure poetry.
Tracy K. Smith
Jacqueline Woodson’s spare, emphatic novel about young women growing up in 1970s Bushwick brings some of our deepest silences-about danger, loss, and black girls’ coming of age-into powerful lyric speech. Another Brooklyn is heartbreaking and restorative, a gorgeous and generous paean to all we must leave behind on the path to becoming ourselves.
Booklist (Starred Review)
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.
Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
There are nothrowaway sentences in Another Brooklyn — each short, poetic line feels carefully loved and polished. The first half of this novel asks urgent questions; the second delivers uneasy, heartbreaking answers. At its core, this book is about fragility, how light shines in the broken places.
Emma Straub
Jacqueline Woodson is a gorgeous writer…lyrical prose, really, really beautiful.
Edwidge Danticat
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is another kind of book, another kind of beautiful, a lyrical, hallucinatory, heartbreaking, and powerful novel. Every gorgeous page leads to another revelation, another poignant event or memory. This is an incredible and memorable book.
Sister Sonia Sanchez
‘’…And Sister Jacqueline Woodson comes singing memory. Her words like summer lightning get caught in my throat and I draw her up from southern roots to a Brooklyn of a thousand names, where she and her three ‘sisters’ learn to navigate a new season. A new herstory. Everywhere I turn, my dear Sister Jacqueline, I hear your words, a wild sea pausing in the wind. And I sing…
BookBrowser Review
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Woodson’s background not only as a novelist but also as a poet, Another Brooklyn is told in spare, lyrical prose, with a surface simplicity that belies its underlying narrative strength and emotional heft. Often, in Woodson’s novel, what isn’t said is as essential as what is, and readers come away feeling as if they, in the process of reading the novel, are somehow partners in Woodson’s project of telling her poignant and devastating story about dreams deferred, destroyed, and—in rare cases—realized.
Angela Flournoy
In this elegant and moving novel, Jacqueline Woodson explores the beauty and burden of growing up girl in 1970’s Brooklyn through the lens of one unforgettable narrator. The guarded hopes and whispered fears that August and her girlfriends share left me thinking about the limits and rewards of friendship well after the novel’s end. Full of moments of grief, grace, and wonder, Another Brooklyn proves that Jacqueline Woodson is a master storyteller.
Seattle Times
emotionally resonant work
Naomi Jackson
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is a wonder. With a poet’s soul and a poet’s eye for image and ear for lyrical language, Woodson delivers a moving meditation on girlhood, love, loss, hurt, friendship, family, faith, longing, and desire. This novel is a love letter to a place, an era, and a group of young women that we’ve never seen depicted quite this way or this tenderly. Woodson has created an unforgettable, entrancing narrator in August. I’ll go anywhere she leads me.
Wall Street Journal
…fine-cadenced prose…
Wall Street Journal
…fine-cadenced prose…
People Magazine
An engrossing novel about friendship, race, the magic of place and the relentlessness of change.
Lauren Francis-Sharma
Grief and friendship are the hallmarks of this story that leap from the pages in a musical prose that is sparse, exacting and breathtaking. A remarkable writer, Woodson illustrates the damning invisibility and unrelenting objectification of girls in this tender tale that wreaks of desperate hopefulness.
Library Journal - Audio
★ 12/01/2016
August, an Ivy League-pedigreed, peripatetic anthropologist who studies death in the farthest reaches of the world, returns home to Brooklyn to bury her father. A chance subway meeting with a childhood friend plunges August back into memories of another Brooklyn of the 1970s, when she was eight and her brother was four. They were newly arrived from Tennessee, lost without a mother, left alone by a father working hard to support and protect his remaining family. August comes of age as part of a quartet of local girls, along with Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi; amidst their dreams of becoming a lawyer, dancer, actress, each must fight the too-eager boys, the abusive men, and the suffocating expectations designed to ensnare their vibrant determination to survive—and achieve. Following Brown Girl Dreaming, which won the young adult National Book Award, Woodson's first adult novel in 20 years is a revelatory record of memory lost and found, of girlhood examined from adulthood, of families born and families chosen, of mutable relationships and everlasting bonds. Narrator Robin Miles's rich elocution adds nuanced depth to Woodson's already magnificent prose. VERDICT A gorgeous, necessary acquisition for every library. ["An evocative portrayal of friendship, love, and loss that will resonate with anyone creating their own identity": LJ 6/15/16 starred review of the HarperCollins hc.]—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC
Library Journal
★ 06/15/2016
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
School Library Journal
12/01/2016
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
AUGUST 2016 - AudioFile
A slow jazz interlude sets the tone for Robin Miles’s performance of this long-awaited new novel for adults by children’s author Jacqueline Woodson. As August’s father dies, she takes time away from studying funeral traditions around the world to come home. Returning brings myriad memories of “growing up ‘Girl’ in Brooklyn” in the 1970s—a time when the borough seemed idyllic to her and her three girlfriends but, in looking back, she now realizes was full of threats to the innocent. Miles’s rich voice embraces dialects, accents, and moods as August’s thoughts float back and forth in time, remembering childhood and adolescent experiences. Miles illuminates the novel’s themes, celebrating Woodson’s lines as if they were fine jazz improvisations. S.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-05-18
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."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. It was 1973. August was 8 years old; her younger brother was 4. Mourning the loss of their mother, it was hard for the children to be alone and friendless in a new city. 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. Now, 20 years later, August has returned to Brooklyn to help her brother bury their father. In lyrical bursts of imagistic prose, Woodson gives us the story of lives lived, cutting back and forth between past and present. 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. Back then, August and her friends, burdened with mothers who were dead or absent, had to navigate the terrifying world of male attention and sexual assault by themselves. "At eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, we knew we were being watched," August says, achingly articulating the experience of a young girl coming of age and overwhelmed by the casual, commonplace, predatory violence of men. There's the pastor who presses his penis against Gigi's back when she sings in the choir; the ex-soldier in the laundry room who rapes Gigi when she's 12. There's August's first boyfriend and her first betrayal. To escape all this, August focuses on school and flees Brooklyn for college out of state and, eventually, work overseas. Here is an exploration of family—both the ones we are born into and the ones we make for ourselves—and all the many ways we try to care for these people we love so much, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing. A stunning achievement from one of the quietly great masters of our time.
