This story of African-American girl August as she and 3 friends grow up in Brooklyn in the 1970's is very deserving of all the praise being heaped upon it. The quick-cutting, stream-of-consciousness writing style can take a short while to adjust to, but once you do, the achingly beautiful, almost poetic nature of the prose makes it hard not to be carried along in thrall. One really feels transported to a different time and place, and comes away with a better understanding of what the American experience was for a different group of people than oneself, while at the same time recognizing the common joys and terrors of growing up that are universal to us all. The themes of grief and the impermanence of friendship that flow throughout are handled beautifully and will have one reflecting back on one's own childhood friends. This is a short but beautiful novel that I will cherish the memory of for a long time.
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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