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    Another Brooklyn: A Novel
    Another Brooklyn: A Novel
    Another Brooklyn: A Novel
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Another Brooklyn: A Novel

    By Jacqueline Woodson

    4/5

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    • Identity

    • Family

    • Friendship

    • Coming of Age

    • Urban Life

    • Power of Friendship

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Search for Identity

    • Forbidden Love

    • Absent Parent

    • Urban Setting

    • Loss of Innocence

    • Impact of Loss

    • Strong Female Protagonist

    • Family Secrets

    • Memory

    • Race

    • Love

    • Belonging

    • Education

    About this ebook

    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.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateAug 9, 2016
    ISBN9780062446329
    Author

    Jacqueline Woodson

    Jacqueline Woodson is the 2014 National Book Award Winner for her New York Times bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor Award, the NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. She is also the author of New York Times bestselling novel Another Brooklyn (Harper/Amistad), which was a 2016 National Book Award Finalist and Woodson’s first adult novel in twenty years. In 2015, Woodson was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She is the author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a three-time National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. http://www.jacquelinewoodson.com/

    Read more from Jacqueline Woodson

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    Reviews for Another Brooklyn

    4/5

    547 ratings63 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a good read that holds their interest. The story line may move around a bit, but readers can get used to it. However, some feel that the ending is abrupt. The book is praised for its adult content and interesting writing style, which leaves a lasting impact on readers.

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      An excellent story of four childhood friends growing up to young adulthood in a poor Black neighborhood told in snipers of memory. Haunting.
    • 4/5
      Outstanding tale of girls growing up in Brooklyn. A prose poem of adolescent confusion, heartbreak and understanding. This was not at all what I was expecting from an author known primarily for works aimed at children. Tough and vulnerable, nostalgic but clear sighted, this is about as adult as fiction gets.
    • 3/5
      Fictional, fragmented memoirs of young African American woman transplanted from TN to Brooklyn. Easy hurricane reading, but too loose a tale for me.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      A story of friendship and coming of age in Brooklyn in the 1970’s. Told from the point of view of August, who experiences the wonder of friendship, the danger of the dark side of Brooklyn, and the melancholy of loss. Beautifully written and narrated.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      Really, really beautifully written. I admit that I did not follow the plot super-closely, I just appreciated the evocative vignettes that make up the book. Well worth your time.
    • 4/5
      Another Brooklyn: A Novel This is very good adult content and very much intresting to seee
    • 5/5
      one of my favorite authors. the lyrical writing style never fails to leave a lasting impact on me
    • 4/5
      I listened to this is in audiobook format.

      This very short novel is about a woman looking back of the events of her formative years-- her mother's death, her best friends' coming of age, her realization of being black and poor. It was well written and interesting but I would have liked to see it developed more, especially the ending. The threads weren't pulled.
    • 3/5
      Woodson tells a complex story in many disconnected pieces. As far as creating character, mood, and image, she excels, though sometimes the plot is confusing and I felt like I was "missing" something several times. This is well-done, though I definitely like Brown Girl Dreaming better. 3.5 stars.
    • 3/5
      This is a story about growing up female and black during the 70's in Brooklyn. It covers from preteen to adult, mostly focusing on the early teen years. Homelife, family, religion, parents, boys, poor people, addicts, kissing, dating, friendships, sex, drugs, music, attitudes, beauty, goals, basically everything about growing up and life is touched on. It almost seemed like a diary of an adult telling about the past and has sort of a poetic feel to it. It's great at putting you in the moment.
    • 5/5

      Another Brooklyn breathtaking.

      A beautiful portrait of longing and memory that is as raw and sharp as it is true and tender. The rhythm of writing mirrors Brooklyn in a way that will have you finishing the pages before you are ready to let August and her story go.
    • 3/5
      Good read. Held interest, despite the fact that the story line moves around a bit but one can get use to that. However it felt like it just ended abruptly.
    • 4/5
      This is my 2nd book by Woodson. She is a poet so her prose is wonderful. This is a short novel that deals with memories of August's a 35 year old anthropologist from her time growing up. It focuses on her girl friends, her brother, dad, and her mom. It is an excellent tale of a life coming together. At 170 pages it is a short read but it is very worthwhile. It deals with the Brooklyn environment in the 70's and the difficulty of dealing poverty and racism. Also read "Red at the Bone" which is even better.
    • 5/5
      My second Jacqueline Woodson book and I was entranced!

      This book felt like an impressionist painting. A young girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, her brother, the kaleidoscope of neighbors, her three closest friends.

      A really rich view into a time that seems long gone.
    • 4/5
      A quietly sad coming-of-age tale set in the impoverished Brooklyn of the 1970s. Brilliantly performed on audio by Robin Miles and one of Jacqueline Woodson's rare adult novels. It explores friendship, grief, and the traumas faced by girls as they become women.CONTENT ADVISORY: non-graphic rape, drug use, suicide
    • 4/5
      Growing up a motherless black girl in 1970s Brooklyn, August has friends who lives get bent or ended in ways she narrowly escapes in part because of her father is a good, if mostly absent man, and she has her love and connection to her brother when her friends troubles overwhelm them. Intense and involving and poetic.
    • 4/5
      This isn't just a novel, it's a love letter to girlhood. Specifically, it's a gorgeously crafted, prose style, love letter to growing up as a black girl in 1970's Brooklyn. Anyone who has read Jacqueline Woodson's writing, knows that she has a knack for transporting her readers straight to wherever her story is set. In this case, that's even truer than before. Through August's memories, through the snippets that she deigns to share with us, the reader is transported straight back to her childhood in a place that wasn't quite home. A place where the mean streets chewed people up, and spit them back out. Unfortunately, not always whole. You can feel this place, this time, pulsing on the page. Another Brooklyn is stunning, and even that compliment is an understatement.

      August allows the reader to follow her back to a time and place where friendship was the only thing keeping her whole. Woodson manages to bring these four girls, and their separate home situations, to life in vivid color. I didn't think it was possible to accomplish that in such a short amount of pages. I was wrong. Each one of these girls is hiding their true self from the others, in the hope that it will allow them to escape into one another for a while. Hoping it will allow them to fade into a group that provides its own kind of family. As those true selves came to light, and I was treated to a glimpse at why these girls needed one another so deeply, my heart broke into pieces. The whole world, at least as they knew it, was against them. Their bravery, as thin a shield as it may have been, was commendable.

      If I had one small complaint, it would be that this book simply isn't long enough. I know that seems trivial, since Woodson is clearly capable of weaving a perfect story in this small amount of pages. However I missed these girls after the story was over. I wanted to hear more about their pasts. To live their stories. To be able to fully mourn the ones who didn't make it. I'd have read 400 pages of this, and not even batted an eyelash. That's the kind of writer that Jacqueline Woodson is, and why you should pay attention. So yes, in case it wasn't obvious, you should read this. It absolutely deserves your time.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Protagonist August returns home to meet her brother due to her father’s illness. She runs into an old friend, spurring memories of growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. She also recalls earlier childhood memories of Tennessee. The friends become aware of the perils and responsibilities that come with adulthood. They face the dangers of an urban environment. It is a story of friendships and loss.

      I very much enjoyed the poetic writing, but it did not quite gel into a cohesive story for me. It is a short book about grief and memories, and the scenes feel impressionistic. This is my first novel by Jaqueline Woodson, and I liked it enough to read more of her catalogue.

    Book preview

    Another Brooklyn - Jacqueline Woodson

    DEDICATION

    For Bushwick (1970–1990)

    In Memory

    EPIGRAPH

    Keep straight down this block,

    Then turn right where you will find

    A peach tree blooming.

    —RICHARD WRIGHT

    CONTENTS

    Dedication

    Epigraph

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Chapter 16

    On Writing Another Brooklyn

    About the Author

    Advance Praise

    Also by Jacqueline Woodson

    Credits

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    1

    For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story. My father could have given in to the bottle or the needle or a woman and left my brother and me to care for ourselves—or worse, in the care of New York City Children’s Services, where, my father said, there was seldom a happy ending. But this didn’t happen. I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.

    If we had had jazz, would we have survived differently? If we had known our story was a blues with a refrain running through it, would we have lifted our heads, said to each other, This is memory again and again until the living made sense? Where would we be now if we had known there was a melody to our madness? Because even though Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and I came together like a jazz improv—half notes tentatively moving toward one another until the ensemble found its footing and the music felt like it had always been playing—we didn’t have jazz to know this was who we were. We had the Top 40 music of the 1970s trying to tell our story. It never quite figured us out.

    The summer I turned fifteen, my father sent me to a woman he had found through his fellow Nation of Islam brothers. An educated sister, he said, who I could talk to. By then, I was barely speaking. Where words had once flowed easily, I was suddenly silent, breath snatched from me, replaced by a melancholy my family couldn’t understand.

    Sister Sonja was a thin woman, her brown face all angles beneath a black hijab. So this is who the therapist became to me—the woman with the hijab, fingers tapered, dark eyes questioning. By then, maybe it was too late.

    Who hasn’t walked through a life of small tragedies? Sister Sonja often asked me, as though to understand the depth and breadth of human suffering would be enough to pull me outside of my own.

    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.

    Twenty years have passed since my childhood. This morning, we buried my father. My brother and I stood shoulder to shoulder at the gravesite, willows weeping down around us, nearly bare-branched against the snow. The brothers and sisters from mosque surrounding us. In the silver light of the morning, my brother reached for and found my gloved hand.

    Afterward, at a diner in Linden, New Jersey, my brother pulled off his black coat. Beneath it, he wore a black turtleneck and black wool pants. The black kufi his wife had knitted for him stopped just above his brow.

    The diner smelled of coffee and bread and bleach. A neon sign flickered EAT HERE NOW in bright green, dusty silver tinsel draping below it. I had spent Christmas Day at the hospital, my father moaning for pain medication, the nurses too slow in responding.

    A waitress brought my brother more hot water for his mint tea. I picked at my eggs and lukewarm home fries, having eaten the bacon slowly to tease my brother.

    You hanging in, Big Sis? he asked, his deep voice breaking up a bit.

    I’m good.

    Still whole?

    Still whole.

    Still eating pork and all the other Devil’s food, I see.

    Everything but the grunt.

    We laughed, the joke an old one from the afternoons I had snuck off with my girls to the bodega around the corner for the foods I was forbidden to eat at home and the bits of bacon still on my plate.

    You still could come stay with me and Alafia you know. Bedrest isn’t contagious.

    I’m good at the apartment, I said. Lots to be done there. All his stuff to go through . . . Alafia doing okay?

    She’ll be all right. Doctors talk like if she stands up, the baby’s gonna just drop right out of her. It’s all good. Baby’ll be fine.

    I started my way into the world two days before July ended but didn’t arrive until August. When my mother, crazed from her long labor, asked what day it was, my father said, It’s August. It’s August now. Shhh, Honey Baby, he whispered. August is here.

    You scared? I asked my brother, reaching across the table to touch his hand, remembering suddenly a photo we had back in SweetGrove, him a new baby on my lap, me a small girl, smiling proudly into the camera.

    A little. But I know with Allah all things are possible.

    We were quiet. Old white couples surrounded us, sipping coffee and staring off. In the back somewhere, I could hear men speaking Spanish and laughing.

    I’m too young to be someone’s auntie.

    You’re gonna be too old to be somebody’s mama if you don’t get busy. My brother grinned. No judgment.

    No judgment is a lie.

    Just saying it’s time to stop studying the dead and hook up with a living brother. I know a guy.

    Don’t even.

    I tried not to think about the return to my father’s apartment alone, the deep relief and fear that came with death. There were clothes to be donated, old food to throw out, pictures to pack away. For what? For whom?

    In India, the Hindu people burn the dead and spread the ashes on the Ganges. The Caviteño people near Bali bury their dead in tree trunks. Our father had asked to be buried. Beside his lowered casket, a hill of dark and light brown dirt waited. We had not stayed to watch it get shoveled on top of him. It was hard not to think of him suddenly waking against the soft, invisible satin like the hundreds of people who had been buried in deep comas only to wake beneath the earth in terror.

    You gonna stay in the States for a minute?

    A minute, I said. I’ll be back for the baby though. You know I wouldn’t miss that.

    As a child, I had not known the word anthropology or that there was a thing called Ivy League. I

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