"Another Brooklyn" by Nat'l Bk Award Winner Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson (b Amer 1963) is an extremely gifted writer of children's books & young adult novels.  "Brown Girl Dreaming" received the Nat'l Bk Award ('14.)  She was honored with the lifetime achievement award as a children's writer; the Margaret Edwards Award ('05.)   Woodson's novel "Another Brooklyn" is a beautifully crafted coming of age novel that reflects back on the friendship & lives of 4 young girls of color in Bklyn during the 1970's.  August is the central heroine who along with her father & brother move from TN to Bklyn following the suicide of her mother.  August never fully comes to terms with her mother's death and propitiates her pain with the fallacy of her mother's impending return.  The sophisticated storytelling is sheathed in a melancholia directed at a mature audience.  August reflects, "Who hasn't walked through a life of small tragedies - What is tragic isn't the moment.  It is the memory."  The essence of Woodson's graceful writing is the feeling of friendship, youth, beauty & omnipotence; the parables of the bonds shared amongst young girls.  August & her friends wanted desperately to believe they's always be connected.  The novel traverses the exhiliration of friendship & youth and the bewilderment & pain that comes with adolescence.  "When you're 15 pain skips over reason, aims right for the marrow." The enhanced writing produces an audible 70's soundtrack & the sentient feel of spray roaring from an open firehouses.  Wonderment turns murkier as the girls mature & become subjected to sexual advances, teen pregnancy, religious fanaticism and death.  August grappled for a deeper understand of death, betrayal & survival.  Her mother taught her early never to trust the friendship of other women.  Her mother also claimed dark skin as a "curse" she needed to find a way past.  The mixed messaging in this deceptively mature "memoir" was sobering.  "When you're 15, the world collapses in a moment, different from when you're 8."   Woodson interlopes inspiring messages of study, striving to become better with harsher views of August & her friends as "ghetto girls." I recommend "Another Brooklyn" for its stunning prose and over-powering reflections.  "Everywhere we looked, we saw people trying to dream themselves."