Jacqueline Woodson: Another Brooklyn

Another Brooklyn (Amistad) is award-winning Young Adult novelist Jacqueline Woodson's first novel for adults in twenty years. Its narrator tells the story of childhood friends as they grow into women. Love and hate are mixed among these four young black women; their intense closeness is shaded with ambiguity. Woodson has structured this brief novel with such care that each re-reading reveals new subtleties of character and new layers of implication -- she is wary of revealing meaning too easily. Within this beautifully written novel elusive distinctions are made between truth, honesty and sincerity -- that is to say that within each memory of Brooklyn there lurks another Brooklyn.

Photo: Gregg Lewis