Another Brooklyn : a novel / Jacqueline Woodson.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

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 provided by Syndetics

Library Journal 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. 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 © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

School Library Journal Review

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 © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Best-selling and acclaimed children's author Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming, 2014) presents an evocative adult novel. August, her memories stirred by running into a friend after her father's funeral, dives headlong back into episodes from her youth. Suddenly, having lived only in Tennessee, eight-year-old August finds herself in her father's hometown of Brooklyn. Stoic young August is bolstered by the responsibility of watching her brother while their father works, and by the certainty that their mother will soon leave Tennessee, too, and join them. From their third-floor window, August and her brother observe the daily despair of poverty, but more notably the world of liberated, unsupervised youth: the skipping rope, the uncapped hydrant, in short, the kids they wish they were. August can't believe her luck when Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi the very girls she has longed to know befriend her. The foursome entertain, sustain, and strengthen one another as they move through their early teens in the 1970s, their developing bodies just one of many perils. 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.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist