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Staff Pick
Red at the Bone tells the story of a multigenerational Brooklyn family. Told from alternating viewpoints and various timelines, we learn about each family member and how their lives came together. Woodson’s writing is spectacular, packing so much detail and emotion into each short chapter. Recommended By Jennifer H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A New York Times Bestseller
One of Oprah Magazine's Best Books of 2019
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
An unexpected teenage
pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes, and
exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind
or divide us from each other, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.
Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson's taut and
powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have
played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these
families, and in the life of the new child.
As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old
Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn
brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her
entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress.
But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very
dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother,
for her own ceremony — a celebration that ultimately never took place.
Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to
show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just
their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid
for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history.
As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification,
education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood,
Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young
people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives — even
before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to
be.
Review
"Woodson famously nails the adolescent voice. But so, too, she burnishes all her characters' perspectives....In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: 'beneath that joy, such a sadness.'" Kirkus (Starred Review)
Review
"[A] beautifully imagined novel...Woodson's nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"Woodson channels deeply true-feeling characters, all of whom readers will empathize with in turn. In spare, lean prose, she reveals rich histories and moments in swirling eddies, while also leaving many fateful details for readers to divine." Booklist
About the Author
Jacqueline Woodson is the bestselling author of more than two dozen award-winning books including the 2016 New York Times-bestselling National Book Award finalist for adult fiction, Another Brooklyn. Among her many accolades, Woodson is a four-time National Book Award finalist, a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a two-time NAACP Image Award Winner, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award Winner. Her New York Times-bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, received the National Book Award in 2014. Woodson is also the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and recipient of the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the 2018 Children's Literature Legacy Award. In 2015, she was named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She lives with her family in New York.