Review of Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

*Another Brooklyn* by Jacqueline Woodson (2016). Published by Amistad.

When I’m working at my remote internship, one of my biggest hobbies as of late is to listen to an audiobook. Although I have a publishing internship in the marketing department, it seems I can’t get enough of books!

While I’m creating content about our books, I end up listening to one as well—it’s kind of like a never-ending cycle. Anyways, this time I landed on Another Brooklyn when I saw that someone I admire recommended it after reading it, and I looked on Libby.

Lo and behold, it was available right then and there for checkout on Libby, so I checked it out and pressed play immediately.

Now, I’ve managed to work my way up to 2x speed, and while I listened to this one on 1.5x speed because I was working, it was a pretty quick listen. I’m pretty sure it took under two and a half hours to get through the book, which means in real life it must be slightly slim compared to some other novels.

I’ve rambled enough! Let’s dive into my review of this novel.

After running into a friend from a distant past, August remembers her childhood in Brooklyn.

Despite this being a brief novel, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a poignant one. Sorry for the double negative there, but I would describe Woodson’s style throughout as being very poetic and striking in their attention to detail, which, as a fellow poet myself, I appreciated a lot.

The story goes back to when August was living in Tennessee with her family, and they’ve begun to grieve when they realize her brother has died in Vietnam. Her mother never recovers from the loss, and her father decides to move the kids to Brooklyn, where they’re going to spend the rest of their childhood.

It’s the seventies, and if you know anything about New York City history, the seventies, especially in Brooklyn, were a time when crime was rampant. It’s partially where the stereotype that New York is dangerous comes from, as before the 2000s, it wasn’t a place you wanted to spend a ton of time in if you didn’t live there.

Anyways, August is restarting her life in Brooklyn, and she’s witnessing a lot of different events at the same time. One of the more prominent I found throughout the novel were the mentions of the Nation of Islam and how her father became involved with it.

There was also the drugs epidemic happening at the same time, and she was not immune from witnessing it. As she grows older, she also has to decide what high schools to go to, and witnesses as her friends become pregnant while she explores her own sexuality.

She begins to realize that there’s a whole new world beyond Brooklyn, and that her mother, who has been absent all these years, was very much afflicted by the loss of her brother in Vietnam in a way that was completely and utterly destructive.

That ends up with August creating a support system with her friends, and as we see in the novel, she grows up to get a good education and is an anthropologist. Her father dies and she returns to bury him, which is what sparks all of the memories and recollections about her life and upbringing in the city to begin with.

Woodson transitions between different periods of August’s life to tell the holistic story of the influences and events she witnessed, also showing how this was such a time of dramatic change for a young Black girl to go through.

Overall Thoughts

I really liked the way this novel was presented, but I could see how someone wouldn’t like it. It’s very lyrical and fragmented at times, which made it harder to discern on an audiobook what was going on.

So if you weren’t paying attention, then you wouldn’t be able to figure out what exactly is happening here. I was paying attention, and due to my training throughout the years as a writer and academic, I could discern these individual elements despite multitasking.

All in all, I thought this was a decent novel that I’d return to someday, but not anytime soon. There is immense value in stories like these, and we often don’t see them.

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