New York Review of Books Review
"THIS IS MEMORY" is the refrain of "Another Brooklyn," Jacqueline Woodson's haunting new novel. Woodson, the recipient of four Newbery Honor awards, has written her first adult novel in 20 years, returning to the Brooklyn setting of "Autobiography of a Family Photo" (1995) and her recent award-winning memoir, "Brown Girl Dreaming." These works form a triptych of bildungsromans taking place in the author's hometown and tracking her generation's coming to adulthood. But in "Another Brooklyn," the subject isn't as much girlhood, as the haunting half-life of its memory. August, an Ivy-educated anthropologist, returns home for the funeral of her father. Her scholarly work centers on burial rituals around the world, an attempt to unravel the mystery and pain of loss. Mourning threads through this elegiac tale. August's Brooklyn story begins 20 years earlier, in 1973, when she moves to the borough following the death of her mother. Eleven years old and deep in denial about her mother's fate, August found comfort and acceptance with a clique of girls whose lives wound around one another's in a series of complex knots. "Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone." That word, "beautiful," appears in the text many, many times - to describe August's father, the drug addict next door, lost mothers, random strangers and of course, one of the girls. This insistence is willful, a declaration that despite the blight of the 1970s, the children playing with hypodermic needles like toys, the menace of Child Protective Services and the ever-present threat of pregnancy and sexual abuse, there was beauty, even amazing beauty; the repeated word becoming a defiant, poetic incantation. The late 1960s and 1970s are a turbulent period in American history, and the girls' lives intersect with a range of national and international horrors. The starving children of Biafra, the Son of Sam murders, the great blackout of 1977, all are the setting against which the girls come of age. And the Vietnam War and its domestic reverberations loom large. The battlefield death of her Uncle Clyde hurled her mother into madness. Former vets, hooked on heroin, nod off in corners. August's up-standing and responsible father returns from the war with only eight fingers, a reminder that even if a man comes home alive and sane, he is not whole. Still, 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. She treasures this closeness even as she feels haunted by her mother's cautionary words about the treachery of women. "She said women weren't to be trusted. Keep your arm out, she said. And keep women a whole other hand away from the farthest tips of your fingernails. She told me to keep my nails long." Her mother's warning looms over the narrative like a witch's curse. FOR NOW, womanhood is a faraway signal, a blinking light, visible, but indecipherable. As August, Angela, Gigi and Sylvia move into adolescence, every kiss feels fraught. Boys are dangerous. They bring with them the possibility of pregnancy, which could cause a girl to be banished "Down South," which is not merely a geographic designation. "We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over single auntie or strict grandmother." Woodson also knows that "Up North" is hardly a promised land. When August and her family first arrived in Brooklyn, white families were moving out, panicked and with sadness, as though they were fleeing a hurricane. "White people we didn't know filled the trucks with their belongings, and in the evenings, we watched them take long looks at the buildings they were leaving, then climb into station wagons and drive away. A pale woman with dark hair covered her face with her hands as she climbed into the passenger side, her shoulders trembling." With this in mind, it's difficult to interpret the meaning of the title. Does "Another Brooklyn" allude to the lost Brooklyn of 1970-90 to which the novel is dedicated? Or maybe "Another Brooklyn" is the secret Brooklyn of girlhood, where young women find strength in the identities they develop together. Referring to the boys of the neighborhood, August observes: "The four of us together weren't something they understood. They understood girls alone, folding their arms across their breasts, praying for invisibility." But this strength they find in one another is no match for the grown men who prey on young girls. The girls' soothing words and touches can only salve the eventual injuries. The heartbreak of girlhood isn't that it doesn't last, as an adult August comes to understand. "What is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory." 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. "When you're 15, pain skips over reason, aims right for the marrow." A boyfriend's dismissive "forget you" feels like a complete spiritual erasure. A teenage jilting is as devastating as the suicide of a friend. But these disappointments are more painful still, layered over the mysterious death of August's mother. 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. TAYARI JONES is the author of "Silver Sparrow."
Library Journal Review
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 Harper-Collins hc.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, -Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
