Thank you for the opportunity to read this book. Unfortunately, it wasn't for me, but I'm sure others will love it.

I honestly expected to enjoy this book so much more than i did.

Its a historical family story! I LOVE those!

But this book felt so shredded, so incomplete, so torn apart, tossed in the air and put back together as the pieces fell.

In other words the story structure was not at all for me, sadly.

I liked August -the main character (not talking about the name! Lets ignore that!)- and her family fine. They where interesting.

I enjoyed how the story kept going rather fluently between present and past.

But nothing fit together for me. I couldn't connect any story parts to each other in a way that it made sense! The individual small snippets where okay on its own, but i don't want to read a book that has 30 very very short stories that feel like they have no connection to each other at all! I wanted to read a novel!

And sadly for me with this writing style and structure that didn't happen.

I am very curious to see what the author can do thought, i see a lot of potential. Its clearly there, the author just didn't go far enough with the story, the plot and the characters to actually reach the great story that she started in this book.

I am not sure if the author simply wanted to keep this book so short and that is why she kept cutting herself off before she reached the "greatness" or if she just didn't know how to take that last step without going overboard? I have no idea!

But i defiantly will be trying another novel by her, to see if this one was just not for me or if the author in general does not write in a way that makes me enjoy reading.

We'll see.

I would recommend this book for everyone that enjoys very short chapters and doesn't mind if that makes the story feel interrupted and not at all fluent.

If you are more like me and need fluent story telling? maybe stay way from this one!

I can see this is an adept writer but, for me, the aim at a YA audience puts me off - the young women are well drawn their attachments and dilemmas not only realistic but important - but I only got less than halfway through - their issues were not compelling for me, and despite authenticity etc. I just was not engaged. I am sure it is my failing.

Another Brooklyn is about August, an anthropologist, who, in Brooklyn for her father's funeral, sees an old friend, which brings back memories of her childhood and the formation and falling apart of her friendship with a group of girls. Most of the book is taken up with retelling her childhood, following her move from Tennessee to Brooklyn.

I'm honestly at a loss as to how to review this book. It is so so good. The writing is wonderful, and so evocative. Perhaps the only issue I had is how short it was - I could read Jacqueline Woodson's writing forever, so I would totally have been OK with another 200 pages added on.

Other than that, I don't have much more to say about this book. There's very little that actually happens in the book - it's all recounted - but despite that, I was completely hooked from the start.

This is not a plot driven narrative, so those of you who love a good meaty story will be disappointed. What this is, is a lyrical character focus of one girl's teenage life in 70's Brooklyn. The prose is exquisite and the author paints a wonderful portrait of sights, sounds and feeling that gets under the skin. It is a short book, relatively easy to finish in a single sitting and while there is no narrative drive moving things forward, I myself found the book hard to put down. Those who relish beautiful prose will enjoy this offering.

4.5★
What a delicious, haunting little book. It’s not fat physically, but it’s sure full of food for thought. Although I have touched on some of the main points of the story (the challenges August faces), this isn't plot-driven, and most is shown to us early.

August and her younger brother have just buried their father, and she looks back twenty years and tells their story. She has had counselling from a therapist, who tells her everyone has suffered tragedies, as if that will ease August’s suffering. (Aren't most of us guilty of that?)

We share her experience as a young girl growing up without a mother. That’s the first challenge.

She keeps assuring her little brother that their mother “is coming, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” , but when she asks her father what’s in the jar, he tells her, with increasing exasperation “You know what’s in that jar.”

She was a carefree, little black girl (the second challenge) in SweetGrove, Tennessee, but her father moved the children to Brooklyn (the third challenge). She reminisces about the first time she saw her three best friends from her window.

“The three of them walked down our block, dressed in halter tops and shorts, arms linked together, heads thrown back, laughing. I watched until they disappeared, wondering who they were, how they . . . became.”
When she has happy times with her three best friends -

“the four of us sharing the weight of growing up Girl in Brooklyn as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying ‘Here. Help me carry this.”

They are slightly different colours and from slightly different social strata (the fourth and fifth challenges) and have to learn to navigate each other’s families. They look different, come from different tribes (my words) – braids, cornrows, long wavy hair, part-Chinese, reddish hair, darker or lighter skin.

She and her brother are tight friends, sharing a room, holding hands for comfort. They spend time looking out their window at the people passing by, wondering how and what they will become when they grow up.

“Everywhere we looked, we saw the people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was someplace other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn.”

And as the girls develop curves, they also learn to navigate the increasing attention of males, both the predatory, creepy older ones and the same-age, urgently horny younger ones whom they want to satisfy. (Now we're up to her sixth challenge.)

“‘The pastor at my church comes up behind me sometimes when I’m singing in choir,’ Gigi said. ‘I can feel his thing on my back. Don’t sing in your church choir. Or if you sing in it, go to another place while you sing.’ And she whispered how she was the queen of other places. ‘Close my eyes and boom, I’m gone. I learned it from my mother,’ she told us. ‘So many days you look in that woman’s eyes and she isn’t even there.’”

This is an experience that would be familiar to most girls and women I know – unwanted physical contact – and the advice that many have probably followed. Kind of like “don’t ask, don’t tell”. I remember hearing English wives were counselled to “Lie back and think of England,” to ensure English population growth.

“Summer came again and men and boys were everywhere, feathery hands on our backsides in crowds, eyes falling too long at our chests, whispers into our ears as we passed strangers. Promises – of things they could do to us, with us, for us.”

Then a cheerleader captain was badly beaten by her family.

“’She got a baby inside her,’ her brother finally admitted. ‘She got sent back Down South.’

“We pulled our boyfriends’ fingers from inside of us, pushed them away, buttoned our blouses. We knew Down South. Everyone had one. Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico. The threat of a place we could end back up in to be raised by a crusted-over single auntie or strict grandmother.”

Their father forms a serious liaison with a Muslim woman after joining the Nation of Islam, (peacefully and happily). He brings home Sister Loretta, whom they like very much and who tells them they are eating poison, and shows them the right way to live. (And I think this is thing number 7, more than enough challenges for one person.)

So she’s motherless, young, coloured, either more or less poor than her friends, doesn’t quite belong to any tribe, and is becoming a teenager full of hormones. And her father’s new faith means it’s goodbye bacon and ham sandwiches at home. Then comes the counselling, mentioned earlier.

“Sister Sonja was a thin woman, her brown face all angles beneath a black hijab. So this is who the therapist became to me – the woman with the hijab, fingers tapered, dark eyes questioning. by then, maybe it was too late.”

In this short book, we even get to see a bit of what happened to the girls when they grew up. It is just wonderful. There were a few repetitive phrases, which jarred ever so slightly, but by golly, what a fine piece of work this is.

Thanks to NetGalley and OneWorld Publications for the review copy from which I've quoted, and I truly hope the quotes don't change in the final copy. I love the writing!

Very short read, and I really enjoyed it. A snapshot of a girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, poor but not as poor as some.

I was drawn to this mainly because of the cover. It is so lovely. The writing is as well. Sadly it's not my cup of tea.
In pieces we get to figure out that after her mother died, August moves to brooklyn with the rest of her family. She meets new friends but life isn't sugar and roses. Now her father died and she comes back. A trip down the memory lane.
The prose is flowery and in fragments, which made it hard for me to really get into the story, into August feelings. I basically didn't cared all too much. The author also pays more attention to beauty then reality. I'm sorry but some of the spoken phrases are just cringeworthy when imagined spoken out loud. But I can see it being poetic. I personally would have prefered another style for the story.
The jumping in the timeline also made it kinda hard to follow. Maybe I just wasn't in the right mindset. Either way, I got it in my store now, and am happy to be able to assist my customers with this. Without the galley I wouldn't knew whom to sell this too. The Galley was highly appreciated.

I adored this novel.

This is the first Jacqueline Woodson book I've read and was struck instantly by her beautiful use of language. Her writing reads like poetry, but never feels forced or overwrought. It is lyrical, atmospheric and sparse yet somehow manages to convey an awful lot in its short pages.

It deserves re-reading and I will return to it as I read the whole thing in breathless sitting, unable to break from the flow of her words.

Exquisite.

Another Brooklyn is a photographic kind of novel, one that creates vivid images and snapshots to show how fleeting time can be and how images might not tell the whole story. It is about the friendship between four girls in 1970s Brooklyn, told from the perspective of one of them, August, and what they saw of each other’s difficulties and differences.

The novel’s non chronological structure and writing style invoke a sense of memory, so the act of remembering feels built into the form and narrative. As with most non-chronological novels, details are hinted out and fleshed out later, but in this short novel, this feels less like holding back information and more akin to the act of telling an old memory, adding in detail that wasn’t meant to come yet. The sketches given of each of the girls’ lives leave plenty of questions, but also show how four girls can come together to be friends and yet that friendship cannot overcome the troubles of the world and the city in which they live.

The title and the narrator dream of ‘another Brooklyn,’ a place beyond the life that has been given, but the novel is also tied to location, to the journeys characters have made to live in Brooklyn, and how Brooklyn seemed like theirs but also not. Another Brooklyn is a welcome change from the often long and male-dominated books set in New York that have proliferated, portraying female friendship and how friendship can be tied to place and time.