Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Jacqueline Woodson is the 2014 National Book Award Winner for Young People’s Literature 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. More about this author >
For August, running into a long-ago friend sets in motion resonant memories and transports her to a time and a place she thought she had mislaid: 1970s Brooklyn, where friendship was everything.
August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi shared confidences as they ambled their neighborhood streets, a place where the girls believed that they were amazingly beautiful, brilliantly talented, with a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful promise there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where mothers disappeared, where fathers found religion, and where madness was a mere sunset away.
Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative period when a child meets adulthood—when precious innocence meets the all-too-real perils of growing up. In prose exquisite and lyrical, sensuous and tender, Woodson breathes life into memories, portraying an indelible friendship that united young lives.
Another Brooklyn is a lyrical beauty, inspiring revelation and surprise with each line as it ensnares the reader in tension and suspense. Adolescent August’s memory-bound Brooklyn leads us to the forgotten and displaced: the poor, the abused, the voiceless, and the dead. The narrative embraces the universal story—ordinary people doing their best to live through and understand the common ailments of human life: grief, neglect, loneliness, and love. In this way, Jacqueline Woodson sings of all humanity.
Jacqueline Woodson reads from Another Brooklyn, 2016 NBAs Finalists Reading
