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Another Brooklyn: A Novel
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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.
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Commencer à lireInformations sur le livre
Another Brooklyn: A Novel
Description
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.
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Avis
This is the type of book I want to study. It's extremely lyrical, in a way that makes you slip into the words and finish the entire thing in one sitting. I loved its honesty, and how it described-- quite shamelessly-- what it is to grow up "Girl" in Brooklyn. I feel like the characters weren't given as much life as I would have liked, and I had trouble remembering who was who, but the story itself is simple and beautiful. It made me sad, and nostalgic for a life I never had. There's much sadness in these words, yet it doesn't come across as sad: this book does not want your pity, it just wants you to see the truth.
A stunning novel, one that-- if you're lucky-- will haunt you.
A stunning novel, one that-- if you're lucky-- will haunt you.
This is the story of August and her best friends; Sylvia, Gigi and Angela, growing up on the mean streets of 1970s Bushwick, Brooklyn. Each of the girls has family problems that they keep hidden from each other- for the most part. But when these four girls hang out together they know that they have each other's back and they know they are fierce and beautiful, and that all the boys want them - even if they're not sure how to feel about that just yet. Their friendship acts as a shield against the bad in the world, even if it's only for a little while. As they get older life starts to pull them apart - career dreams, religion, family tragedy and teen pregnancy. Woodson always makes me feel nostalgic for my own childhood and teen years in 1970s NYC. This book is an ode to girlhood, to hanging out with your best friends, to roaming the neighborhood and the parks because it was still mostly safe, discovering boys, and the music that made the 70s. Recommended.
This is a beautiful little book. I was surprised, although I shouldn't have been, to be moved to tears at the end remembering all the various pains we as girls and young women carry and hold.
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.
An excellent story of four childhood friends growing up to young adulthood in a poor Black neighborhood told in snipers of memory. Haunting.
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.
Fictional, fragmented memoirs of young African American woman transplanted from TN to Brooklyn. Easy hurricane reading, but too loose a tale for me.
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.
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.
Short vignettes out of the life of August as she adjusts to moving to Brooklyn from Tennessee. She tells of herself and her three friends as they grow up and grow apart. I am not sure what I feel about this book. It is an interesting writing style. I liked the short vignette style but do not feel I got the whole tale of what was happening. I was glad I read this for book club as I had questions on how life turned out for some of the girls. I will read more of her
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.
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.
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.
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.
Long a fan of this author, I've read almost every book published. There is no difficulty understanding why this book was a Nation Book Award Finalist.Free style and lyrical, Autumn (named for the month she was born), takes us back to Brooklyn to bury her father. And, as she goes through the process of going back to the apartment to go through his objects, her memories flash and float along.Moving from the south with her father and brother, she longed to know more about the mother left behind. This is a common thread woven throughout the story. The longing for her mother never ends.Living in Brooklyn in a touch neighborhood when men hid under steps to grab girls after their latest heroin fix, as children yelled in the streets as they ran after the Mister Softee ice cream truck, and girls tried to hold on their their virginity as long as possible.This is a story of growing up in Bronx in the 70's with three close friends. Hoping their differences would not divide them and a future was theirs. Now grown with a Ivy league degree, she made it out of Brooklyn, only to return now and resurrect memories that are both sad and happy.
August, Gigi, Sylvia and Angela. As preteens growing up in Brooklyn, these black girls were inseparable, but eventually they went their separate ways. After her father's death, August reflects back on their friendship and her childhood.Woods's spare prose belies the complexity of this novel. Written in short vignettes, almost dreamlike in memory and weaving back and forth in time slowly revealing August's story, the novel has a rhythm all its own. It's easy to read in a sitting or two, yet will stay with me for a long time.
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.
Jacqueline Woodson has a unique way with words that keeps readers enthralled. in Another Brooklyn she describes her transition from SweetGrove, Tennessee to Brooklyn, New York after her mother's mental collapse on the death of her brother. It was a whole new world from the freedom of the land to the confines of an apartment. However, gradually her father let her roam outside and she made 'life long' friends, which we all know never really lasts throughout life.Another Brooklyn is an extremely well written novel which could very well have been an autobiography.
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.
August, an Ivy League-educated anthropologist, reminisces about her coming-of-age years in Brooklyn in the 1970s. She, her father, and her brother had left Tennessee and moved to New York. There, she met her girls: Gigi, Angela, and Sylvia – and their friendship was everything – until it wasn't. Inseparable, they ambled their Brooklyn streets, believing they were talented, beautiful, brilliant – that the future belonged to them. But just beneath the surface, Brooklyn was another city, too: of drugs, prostitution, gangs, and violence -- , 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.Another Brooklyn is a poignant coming-of-age story, reminding us of the joy and the hope in growing up, and of the friendships that united us – but also of the peril. August speaks of historical and cultural references, which I connected with on a personal level from my own adolescent years: the Biafran War, and the heartbreaking children of Biafra; The Flying Nun; the Close ‘N Play record players. Recommended.
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.
Jacqueline Woodson's latest novel, which was chosen as a finalist for this year's National Book Award for Fiction, is narrated by August, an African American woman of 35 who returns to Brooklyn after the death of her father. She revisits her teenage years in the mid 1970s spent there in the company of her father, younger brother, and especially the three girlfriends who meant as much to her as anyone else during that time. Each girl had a unique background, and brought a different aspect to their shared relationship: August came from rural Tennessee, Gigi from South Carolina, and Sylvia from Martinique, with Angela, the most streetwise of the four, being the only one who was born in Brooklyn. Their families were also quite different, although each one struggled to survive in the increasingly dangerous streets of that troubled borough, which were plagued by heroin addicts, prostitutes, and gangs, as white residents fled their neighborhoods and rented their homes to anyone who could pay a deposit and one month's rent.The girls' experiences match the changes and increasing danger in their neighborhood, as their developing bodies and sexuality put them at greater risk by predatory boys and men who wish to claim their innocence and derail their promising futures.The novel consists of short paragraphs, narrated in the first person by August, with evocative descriptions of the city and the music of the time that somewhat reminded me of my own considerably less troubled childhood living in nearby Jersey City in the early 1970s, particularly when August mentions her Close 'N Play record player, which I received as a birthday present in 1969.Another Brooklyn is another solid effort by Woodson, whose previous young adult novel Brown Girl Dreaming won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2014. Although I wasn't moved as much by her latest work, it was still a memorable read, which I would highly recommend to everyone.
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.
This book reads like poetry rather than prose. It is even broken up almost in stanzas like poetry. Set mainly in the 1970s of Brooklyn, New York City this novel tells the story of a woman, August, from our time looking back to those days after the death of her father and to the friendship she had with three girls, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi.August, her brother, and her father left her mother's family home in Tennessee after their mother went crazy when her brother died in Vietnam and she refused to believe it and threatened to become violent. August hopes that her mother will join the family soon. She was eight and her brother was four when they moved to Brooklyn.It would take them a while to fit in, but when they did and she made friends with the three girls, Sylvia the singer whose family has money and disapproves of them, Angela the dancer who is keeping secrets about her home life, and Gigi, the actress. The girls are inseparable and seek to protect each other from the men who lurk in the shadows seeking to harm them.This is a world of damaged veterans returning from the war and of drug addicts, mainly heroin, seeking to escape the pain of life. Her downstairs neighbor is a prostitute drug addict. But her world is also made up of her father's new religion, The Nation of Islam. While her brother readily embraces it, she does not quite so much. This is a beautifully written book that explores the themes of growing into womanhood and childhood friendships. You really want to know what makes August into the woman she becomes and the people who influence that character along the way. I highly recommend this book.QuotesI know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.-Jacqueline Woodson (Another Brooklyn p 1)My mother had not believed in friendship among 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.-Jaqueline Woodson (Another Brooklyn p 19)
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.
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.
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.
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.
When August returns to Brooklyn to be with her father in his last days, the memory of growing up there is presented in beautiful glimpses of how three girls depended on each other to survive. "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." Their bonds were necessary but tenuous; each girl's story both fascinating and tragic. "On a different planet, we could have been Lois Lane or Tarzan’s Jane or Mary Tyler Moore or Marlo Thomas. We could have thrown our hats up, twirled and smiled. We could have made it after all. We watched the shows. We knew the songs. We sang along when Mary was big-eyed and awed by Minneapolis. We dreamed with Marlo of someday hitting the big time. We took off with the Flying Nun. But we were young. And we were on earth, heading home to Brooklyn." Woodson is a talented writer. In the afterward, she shares:"A writer writes to hold on. I wanted the Bushwick of my childhood remembered on the page—so I created four girls who were fascinating and foreign to me, stepping far outside of my own childhood. Then I sat them down in a neighborhood that was once as familiar to me as air."Highly recommend this finalist for the 2016 National Book Award.
I loved this beautifully written story of four pre-teen girls, August, Sylvia, Angela and Gigi coming of age in the mid '70's. The story is told from the vantage point of August. When her mother has mental health issues, August and her brother are uprooted from their Tennessee farm by their father and move to Brooklyn, New York. Brooklyn is not an easy place to grow up. Drugs, murder and prostitution affect the girls on a daily basis. Their home lives are not at all ideal and even their friendship suffers from betrayal. The story follows them to adulthood and reveals the path that each as taken.I especially liked the references made to songs of the 70's, Rock the Boat, Minnie Riperton and Al Green, they all added to the authenticity of the era. Highly recommended.
How does she do it? In less than 200 pages, Jacqueline Wilson has painted an evocative portrait of a young woman coming of age in Bushwick in the 1970s. The setting, the people, and the emotions were all so vivid; I felt transported back to that place and time. At the center of the novel is August, born in Tennessee and now living with her father and brother in Brooklyn.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."For a long time, August watches Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi from her window, but one day she is accepted into their social circle. Every one of them wants to give the impression of having it all together, when in reality each girl is faced with family issues, economic issues, or both. They journey together into their teens, their sexuality emerging and presenting still more issues to grapple with. They support one another, and they work against one another, too -- again, Woodson brilliantly captures the power of female friendship. Her writing is sublime. Just read this book and let it wash over you.
This is a short but beautifully written novel about a pre-teen girl and her younger brother growing up in the 1970's in Brooklyn, after leaving their mentally ill mother behind in Tennessee. As a newcomer to the inner city, August and her brother are overwhelmed by their new life and surroundings. With their father as their sole provider, they are frequently left alone at home and yearn to play with the kids out in the street. They also desperately miss their mother and long for the day she comes to meet them in Brooklyn. As August acclimates at school and is accepted into a clique of other girls, she gradually comes to see how each girls' situation is similar and different from her family's life. The story moves between the past, present, and future, recalling the experience of growing up motherless but also loved in a neighborhood where people move in and out on a daily basis.I loved the descriptive language and emotions evoked by this story. For such a tiny novel, the author is able to wrench strong emotions with very few words. Lovely and heartbreaking and very deserving of the many awards it will most certainly win.