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Another Brooklyn
by Jacqueline Woodson
Book Summary:
From Harper Collins
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.
Author Biography:
from Harper Collins
Jacqueline Woodson is the 2014 National Book Award Winner for her New York Times
bestselling memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, which was also a recipient of the Coretta Scott King
Award, a Newbery Honor Award, the NAACP Image Award, and the Sibert Honor Award. She is
also the author of New York Times bestselling novel Another Brooklyn (Harper/Amistad), which
was a 2016 National Book Award Finalist and Woodson’s first adult novel in twenty years. In
2015, Woodson was named Young People’s Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She is
the author of more than two dozen award-winning books for young adults, middle graders, and
children; among her many accolades, she is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a three-time
National Book Award finalist, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner.
Review #1: New York Times
“Jacqueline Woodson’s Adult Novel Captures 1970s Brooklyn”
by Tayari Jones, Aug. 18, 2016
(Click for Full Link)
Excerpt:
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…
Review #2: Washington Post
‘Another Brooklyn’ reminds us of a Brooklyn far from the tony borough of today”
By Ron Charles, Aug. 12, 2016
(Click for Full Link)
Excerpt:
In a voice that mingles the child’s longing with the adult’s awareness, August studies a trio of
girls who pass below her window. “I was beginning to hate them,” she says. “I was beginning to
love them.” When her father finally lets her leave the apartment, she quickly bonds with these
girls, and the four of them form a tight support group in a world determined to humiliate them,
eager to molest them. “We were learning to walk the Brooklyn streets as though we had always
belonged to them — our voices loud, our laughter even louder. But Brooklyn had longer nails
and sharper blades.”
Some of the book’s most moving passages involve their efforts to encourage each other. One
girl wants to become an actress; another a dancer; another a lawyer. But everywhere the
culture conspires against them. “Something about the curve of our lips and the sway of our
heads suggested more to strangers than we understood,” Woodson writes. One by one, the
girls are lured or dragged away from their dreams, sometimes with shocking, even deadly
results. “When you’re fifteen,” August says, “pain skips over reason, aims right for marrow.”
Which is right where this exquisite novel strikes, too.
Although less formally experimental than “Brown Girl Dreaming,” “Another Brooklyn” still
presents its own distinctive structure: Every paragraph is set off by blank lines, which
emphasizes the poetic style of Woodson’s prose. That structure also effectively slows the
narrative down and contributes to its dream-like tone. Time is fluid in this story, as August
recalls events that impressed her — and events that she repressed, reaching back to moments
in Tennessee and forward to relationships later in life. “Death didn’t frighten me. Not now. Not
anymore. But Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat,” she says. “I know now that what is tragic
isn’t the moment. It is the memory.”
Author Interview: Poets & Writers
A Great Good: Interview with Jacqueline Woodson
By Rigoberto González, SEPT/OCT, 2016
(Click for Full Link)
Excerpt:
The dedication of Another Brooklyn reads “For Bushwick (1970–1990) In Memory,” which
covers the span of August’s coming-of-age in the novel. The reader also gets to observe
Brooklyn come of age, as it negotiates the changes and challenges of those eras,
through the perspective of a young black woman—a point of view that’s relatively absent
from the portrayals of Brooklyn in literature. What drew you to tell this story at this stage
of your career? Why this book now?
The Bushwick that’s on the page is a true place, as it exists in the book. I wanted to put that on
the page in its true existence because when a neighborhood becomes gentrified, its new
inhabitants think they’ve discovered someplace new, but that place had a story before them.
Bushwick is its own character, and this book is one of its biographies. I wanted to pay homage
to the Bushwick I grew up in, so my dedication also suggests this book is an elegy to a place
and time that is no longer with us. Overlaid on that biography is the narrative of the four girls,
which is fiction. After having written Brown Girl Dreaming, which is a memoir, I really wanted to
move away, just for a moment, from children’s literature and explore something I felt was
invisible, which is the story of the black girl in Brooklyn.
I’m trying to place Another Brooklyn as part of the borough’s writer-of-color lineage. I
see Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones, published in 1959, and there are a few
contemporary works, such as Daniel José Older’s Shadowshaper, but one has to really
dig hard to find those narratives that are not centered on white characters. What areas
need that literary attention in order to expand what is celebrated as Brooklyn’s—and New
York’s—cultural heritage?
There is so much territory left to explore in New York City in general. I feel like Brownsville is not
on the page, East New York is not on the page; there are stories from the Bronx and Harlem,
but since Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas not enough books about the black NYC
experience are getting talked about. DJ does a great job in Shadowshaper, writing the black
Latino perspective on the page, but we need more. Even in the Bushwick I grew up in there was
a larger Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Ecuadorean population—I would love to see those
stories, that Brooklyn.
And I’m even remotely interested in the vision of the kids of the hipsters who are growing up in
those neighborhoods now. I know their stories are not going to be my story because of our
differences in class and race, but I feel they too are part of all of these deep pockets that are not
represented. I’m waiting for more stories from Queens—from Jackson Heights and the Hindu
population. There’s so much that still needs to be told in order to shape this city in a way that’s
nuanced. We still have a pretty flat narrative.
Supplementary Work: Poems
By Jacqueline Woodson
From poetryfoundation.org
A girl named jack
The right way to speak
genetics
Discussion Questions:
Prepared by Jack Saari for Portland Public Library
1. In “Another Brooklyn,” Jacqueline Woodson tells her story using a very unconventional
narrative structure. How would you describe her story telling method?
2. “This is memory” is a frequent refrain in the book. How does that line reflect in the
narrative structure? What does she mean by “this is memory”? Why is the line important
in the book?
3. Of the four girls—Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, and August—is there one you related to
specifically? A home life you recognize as your own or a friend’s?
4. Jacqueline Woodson refers to being fifteen multiple times throughout the book: “When
you’re fifteen, pain skips right over reason, aims right for the marrow”; “When you’re
fifteen, the world collapses in a moment.” Do you have such visceral memories from
when you were fifteen?
5. At one point a grown August thinks to herself, “I know now that what is tragic isn’t the
moment. It’s the memory.” How does that quote bring weight to the stories of a fifteen
year old girl? If August was narrating this story at fifteen would you take her as seriously
as you do her memories as an adult? Do you feel the adults in your life took you
seriously at fifteen?
6. Early on in the book, August, now older, thinks to herself: “How do you begin to tell your
own story?” How does August begin to tell her own story? Do you think this whole book
is the beginning of her whole life story? What does this book being the beginning of
August’s story say about how she sees herself as an adult?
7. August’s father and brother become increasingly religious as the book progresses. Their
progression mirrors August’s own growth with her friends. How would you compare
these coping mechanisms, these means of community? Are they comparable? When
facing difficult times do you turn to religion or friends? Both?
8. August compares being together with her friends to jazz music. Why do you think she
chose this comparison? Is it apt? In what ways does the jazz, blues, and soul music she
references reflect her identity better than top 40 radio?
9. Looking at the story as a whole, would you say August grew up too soon? What about
when she was fifteen and was refusing to talk? Was that growing up or going back?
When do we do most of our growing?
10. This is Jacqueline Woodson’s first adult novel (she previously spent twenty years as a
children’s author and poet). Could you tell? How does this compare and contrast to a
children’s book? Knowing this book is highly autobiographical, why do you think she
wanted this book to be an “adult novel”?
