Another Brooklyn (Woodson)

Another Brooklyn 
Jacqueline Woodson, 2016
HarperCollins
192 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062359988


Summary
Nominated, 2016 National Book Awards

The acclaimed 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. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth— February 12, 1963
• Where—Columbus, Ohio, USA
• Raised—Geenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York
• Education—B.A., Adelphi University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York


Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and teens. She is best known for her 2014 Bown Girl Dreaming, which won the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor. In 2016, she published her first adult novel, Another Brooklyn, and in 2019 she released her second adult novel, Red at the Bone, both to wide praise.

Woodson's youth was split between South Carolina and Brooklyn. In a 2002 interview with Publishers Weekly she recalled:

The South was so lush and so slow-moving and so much about community. The city was thriving and fast-moving and electric. Brooklyn was so much more diverse: on the block where I grew up, there were German people, people from the Dominican Republic, people from Puerto Rico, African-Americans from the South, Caribbean-Americans, Asians.

After college at Adelphi University, Woodson went to work for Kirchoff/Wohlberg, a literary agent for children's authors. She caught the attention of a book agent, and athough the partnership did not work out, it got her first manuscript out of a drawer.

She later enrolled in Bunny Gable's children's book writing class at the New School in New York, where an editor at Delacorte, heard a reading from Last Summer with Maizon and requested the manuscript. Delacorte bought the manuscript and published Woodson's first six books.

Writing
As an author, Woodson is known for the detailed physical landscapes she writes into each of her books. She places boundaries everywhere—social, economic, physical, sexual, racial—then has her characters break through both the physical and psychological boundaries to create a strong and emotional story.

She is also known for her optimism. She has said that she dislikes books that do not offer hope. She has offered William H. Armstrong's 1969 novel Sounder as an example of "bleak" and "hopeless"; on the other hand, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn offers "moments of hope and sheer beauty" despite the family's poverty. She uses this philosophy in her own writing, saying, "If you love the people you create, you can see the hope there."

Woodson has tackled topics such as interracial coupling, teenage pregnancy, and homosexuality—subjects not commonly or openly discussed when her books were published. Overall, she explores issues of class, race, family ties, and history in ground-breaking ways, and she does so by placing sympathetic characters into realistic situations. Many of her characters, who might be considered "invisible" in the eyes of society, engage in a search for self-identity rather than equality or social justice.

Some of the content in Woodson's books, however, has raised flags—homosexuality, child abuse, harsh language, and teen pregnancy have led to threats of censorship. In an NPR interview Woodson said that her books contain few curse words and that the difficulty adults have with her subject matter has more to do with their own discomfort than what young people should be thinking about. She suggests parents and teachers assess the many cultural influences over teens and then make a comparison with how her books treat those same issues.

Honors
Woodson's books have won numerous awards, including four Newbery Honors for Brown Girl Dreaming (2014), After Tupac & D Foster (2008), Feathers (2007), and Show Way (2005). Miracle's Boys (2000) won the Loretta Scott King Award. In 2005 Woodson won the Margaret Edwards Award for her lifetime contribution as a children's writer.

In 2014 Brown Girl Dreaming won the national Book Award for Young People's Literature. That same year she was the U.S. nominee to the international Hans Christian Andersen Awards and became one of the Award's six finalists. In 2015 the Poetry Foundation named Woodson the Young People's Poet Laureate.

Racial joke
When Woodson received her National Book Award in November, 2014, author Daniel Handler, the evening's emcee, made a joke about watermelons. In a New York Times Op-Ed piece, "The Pain of the Watermelon Joke," Woodson explained that "in making light of that deep and troubled history," Handler had come from a place of ignorance. She underscored the need for her mission to "give people a sense of this country's brilliant and brutal history, so no one ever thinks they can walk onto a stage one evening and laugh at another's too often painful past."

Handler, a friend of Woodson, issued multiple apologies and donated $10,000 to We Need Diverse Books, promising to match donations up to $100,000. "It was a disaster of my own making, he said. "[M]any, many people were very upset by it, and rightfully so."

Personal
Woodson is a lesbian with a partner and two children, a daughter named Toshi Georgianna and a son named Jackson-Leroi. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 8/17/2016.)

Book Reviews
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


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


[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


An engrossing novel about friendship, race, the magic of place and the relentlessness of change.
People Magazine


(Stared review.) With dreams as varied as their conflicts, the young women confront dangers lurking on the streets [and] discover first love.... Woodson draws on all the senses to trace the milestones in a woman’s life and how her early experiences shape her identity.
Publishers Weekly


(Stared review.) 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.  —Stephanie Sendaula
Library Journal


(Stared 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
Booklist


(Stared review.) 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.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Consider the epigraph from Richard Wright that begins the novel. In what ways are the images and ideas relevant to the story that follows?

2. How are each of the girls—Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and the narrator August—similar or different?

3. What does it mean that the girls "came together like a jazz improv"? In what ways is jazz music about relationships?

4. When she is 15, August "was barely speaking" anymore. What were the reasons for this? Why might ceasing to speak be a response to difficulty?

5. What did the four girlfriends provide each other at different stages of their lives andstruggles?

6. What is added to our understanding of August’s experience and life in the city by the fact that she went on to study anthropology? What does such a discipline help her understand about her life?

7. While August had her girlfriends, her brother had his faith. How are these two support systems similar or different?

8. What are the many and varied effects on August of her mother’s death?

9. For much of her childhood and adolescence, August believes that her mother will return. Why is this? What does it take and mean to accept such tragedy? Can denial ever be valuable?

10. What’s the effect of Woodson weaving into the novel details of how other cultures throughout history have responded to the death of loved ones? Which of these rituals seems most powerful or effective?

11. In what ways is August’s father helpful or not as she struggles with her mother’s death?

12. Throughout the novel, Woodson writes, "This is memory." What does this mean in the context of the story? What is the nature of memory? In what ways is memory valuable or burdensome?

13. August’s mother had taught her that girls and women do not make good friends. What did she mean by this? How does August’s experience with her girlfriends support or contradict this idea?

14. After moving to the neighborhood, August and her brother could not go outside but watched other children through the window. Why did their father believe the world wasn’t a safe place? In what ways might the image of watching through the window be symbolic?

15. What does it mean for the girls to have shared "the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn?" What were the particular threats or challenges for them growing up in the neighborhood? How did each affect them? How did they respond?

16. August and her brother notice the profound way that many people in the neighborhood try "to dream themselves out…as though there was another Brooklyn." What does this mean? In what ways is dreaming helpful or harmful during difficult or oppressive times?

17. August’s brother comes to love learning math. Why does it appeal to him? What role does education play for each of them as they grow into adulthood? Why didn’t each of the other girls pursue further education?

18. To what extent is Sister Loretta a valuable person for August? What changed for better or worse with "the woman who was not Sister Mama Loretta"?

 19. What complex forces drew the four girls apart as they grew older?

20. Eventually August accepts that Brooklyn, not Tennessee where they had all lived with her mother, was home. Why? What qualities determine a place as home? How might a feeling of home exist separate from any particular place?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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