Another Brooklyn is a brand new release from Jacqueline Woodson, who is best known for her middle grade novels Brown Girl Dreaming, Feathers, and Locomotion, all of which have been award-winning books. She’s also written many others that are recognized in the kid-lit world. Another Brooklyn was long listed for the National Book Award. Woodson is serious about creating spectacular books.
This story is about a girl named August, who runs into an old childhood friend and is suddenly thrown into a sea of memories from when she was a girl on the brink of becoming a woman. She had three best friends—Sylvia, Angela and Gigi. They shared everything. They survived the streets of Brooklyn because they took on the city and their futures together.
This book was achingly heartbreaking because it examined that strange time between adult and child, when your innocence and childlike hopes meet the realities of the world. Anything could happen in that place—and it did in this book. Girls were damaged in their homes. Mothers disappeared. The madness of the world came for them.
Another Brooklyn seemed almost memoir-like, and had the appearance of a time-lapse video, where you watch time go by and people grow older. It was a commentary on hard life and poverty. It was also a poetic masterpiece, which is something I’ve come to expect from Woodson.
Not only that, but Woodson is a master at creating likable characters. It does not take a reader long to care about the characters Woodson creates on the page, who are all mostly poor and female. I found myself relating to them in ways I would not have expected, though I have never lived in Brooklyn and I am a white woman. But poverty is a common language, so I recognized myself in her characters.
I really liked the issues that this book explored. There was the issue of poverty, there was the issue of being black in Brooklyn, there was the issue of simply being a female in Brooklyn, and there was the issue of being a black female in Brooklyn. There was the passage of time and how it changes us. There were the unexpected turns of life that show us what we’re made of. Everything that this book explored was so much more than its slim pages would suggest. It was a short book, but it was a very deep one, too.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Another Brooklyn. Sylvia’s father has just asked August what she wants to do when she grows up:
“But listening to Sylvia’s father, I felt myself straightening my back, tilting my chin up. Law, I wanted to say, like you. I want truth, I wanted to say. An absolute truth, or if not truth, reason—a reason for everything. But the hems of my bellbottoms were tattered. My socks in this shoeless house had holes in the heels. In the winter, because of my own absentmindedness, my hands and arms were often ashy. How could I even think of aspiring to anything when this was how I walked thorough the world? Sylvia’s mother’s flick of an eye said to us again and again, Don’t dream. Dreams are not for people like you.”
I read My Name is Lucy Barton a few weeks ago, because one of my all-time favorite adult fiction authors is Elizabeth Strout, who is the author of this book and who also wrote Olive Kitteridge, a fantastic collection of short stories forming a cohesive story that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009. My Name is Lucy Barton is Strout’s newest release, which published earlier this year.
The book is about a woman, Lucy Barton, who is in the hospital with a sickness that remains vague throughout the story. The type of sickness doesn’t really matter to the story—only inquisitive minds like mine. During her hospital stay, Lucy’s mother comes to visit. She hasn’t seen her mother in years. They talk—-gossip, really—-about all that has happened to the people they knew when Lucy was younger. They talk about everything except for Lucy’s childhood, which was quite traumatic.
The reader learns of this childhood in asides, but Lucy can never bring it up to her mother, even though she’s a grown woman and it’s clear that the past is what keeps Lucy and her mother from truly bonding.
What was so heartbreaking about this story is that you could feel the emotional distance, and, at the same time, the longing that Lucy had to close that distance. She wanted to talk to her mother about what had happened when she was a child, but, out of love and respect for her mother, she never did. It was a tragic missed opportunity, but Lucy felt it was a kind of protection for her mother.
Probably my favorite thing about this book was that it felt almost like a memoir (much like Woodson’s book)—-Lucy Barton was looking back at a difficult life and writing her way into hope in spite of the circumstances. The last line of the book was “All life amazes me,” and it was clear throughout the story that all of life actually did amaze Lucy Barton. She had no anger toward her parents for giving her such an unstable childhood. She never stopped loving them.
My Name is Lucy Barton was a brilliant work of art, a commentary on life and family and the troubling pasts that serve to shape us into who we are because of how we choose to rise above them. Though it was short, it was incredibly profound. I don’t think I’ll be forgetting Lucy Barton for a long, long time.
Be sure to visit my recommendation page if you’re interested in seeing some of my best book recommendations. If you have any books you recently read that you think I’d enjoy, don’t hesitate to get in touch. And, if you’re looking for some new books to read, stop by my starter library, where you can get a handful of my books for free.
*The books mentioned above have affiliate links attached to them, which means I’ll get a small kick-back if you click on them and purchase. But I only recommend books I enjoy reading myself. Actually, I don’t even talk about books I didn’t enjoy. I’d rather forget I ever wasted time reading them.
