Jacqueline Woodson on Another Brooklyn, August’s #1 Indie Next List Pick

Independent booksellers have selected Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn (Amistad) as the top Indie Next List pick for the month of August.

Nicole Yasinsky of The Booksellers at Laurelwood in Memphis, Tennessee, described Another Brooklyn as “a beautiful, heart-wrenching novel of a young girl’s coming-of-age in Brooklyn” by “one of the most skilled storytellers of our day.”

Woodson, who has written more than two dozen books for children and young adults, won the 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the American Booksellers Association’s 2015 E.B. White Read-Aloud Award for Middle Grade Readers, and the 2015 Coretta Scott King Award, among other honors, for her 2014 memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books). In June 2015, she began a two-year term as Young People’s Poet Laureate. Another Brooklyn marks Woodson’s return to writing for adults, 20 years after the publication of her only previous adult novel, Autobiography of a Family Photo (Dutton).

In Another Brooklyn, Woodson’s narrator, the teenage August, is a transplant from Tennessee growing up black and female in 1970s Bushwick, Brooklyn, where she struggles to deal with the grief of losing her mother. As she navigates the perils and the pleasures of girlhood, August is nourished by the company of her three very close girlfriends, sharing secrets and dreaming of the future. As the girls become women, August and her friends each stray from — or are drawn from — their cozy, cohesive unit and begin to take on their own identities.

“Effortlessly weaving poetic prose, Woodson tells the story of the relationships young women form, their yearning to belong, and the bonds that are created — and broken,” said Yasinsky. “Brooklyn itself is a vivid character in this tale — a place at first harsh, but one that becomes home and plays a role in each character’s future.”

Woodson explained that, following the widespread acclaim for Brown Girl Dreaming, she decided to return to writing for adults because she has always been interested in pushing herself to explore different projects.

“I started writing Another Brooklyn well before writing Brown Girl Dreaming and then Brown Girl Dreaming won all those awards, so afterward I thought, I can do something else now,” she said. “But I know the world of children’s literature very well and I will always be a part of it.”

Woodson noted that writing an adult novel is significantly different from writing a children’s book, both in what it allows her to do in a literary sense and in the sense of subject matter.

“One thing I allowed myself to do in Another Brooklyn is play with [places] and go back and forth in time. I’m allowed to have the protagonist stand outside her life,” said Woodson, adding that she could be much more implicit in certain aspects of her writing. And when needed, she could also include sexual content that might be inappropriate for young readers.

“In my writing, I pay very, very close attention to language,” Woodson said. “There is a lot of writing and rewriting and reading out loud, and so it also looks a certain way on the page. In Brown Girl Dreaming, I was allowed to play with white space in a different way.

“With this book, I took more chances and really kind of went in knowing that it would be different, more of a ‘biography of place.’ In writing it, I played with time and memory and really put on the page people who have historically not been represented.”

The character of August weaves a narrative peppered with flashbacks, reminiscences, and stream of consciousness passages framed by her experience of running into an old friend on her return home to Brooklyn as an adult. She is visiting her old neighborhood on a temporary break from her travels as an anthropological researcher and death specialist in order to be with her dying father.

At various intervals throughout the book, Woodson uses descriptions of death and death rituals from around the world to illustrate August’s lifelong fascination and struggle with the concept.

“I wanted to talk about August finding her place in the world, and I wanted to explore the idea of death,” Woodson said. “Our culture is one of the least evolved cultures when it comes to death. So many other people in other cultures have a sense of what mortality means and how it is a part of a circle, and it’s not the same way in American culture. Death rituals around the world fascinate me, and I had this character who was obsessed with death, without even realizing what was going on inside her.”

In writing Another Brooklyn, Woodson also sought to talk about the complexities of friendships among women.

“I wanted to look at friendships among women, now, as an adult,” said Woodson. “I know women who have these deep, long friendships, and there are some women I know who have no female friends. I have a lot of old friends and deeply loved friends. I wanted to explore how someone would get to that place of being so outside their circle of protection and friendships. I wanted to look at friendships from that adolescent perspective, when it is so deep and important and life-altering — how does one grow up having had that?”

Woodson will be touring to promote her new novel at independent bookstores in 20 cities. Where she lives in Brooklyn, Woodson said her favorite indies are BookCourt and Greenlight Bookstore. She is also a fan of Joseph-Beth Booksellers, which has locations in Ohio and Kentucky, and Scuppernong Books in Greensboro, North Carolina, as well as Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., and Cover to Cover Children’s Books in Columbus, Ohio.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been at an indie bookstore I didn’t like,” said Woodson, whose last book tour was for Brown Girl Dreaming. “One of the things I like is that they are so different in so many ways, but at the same time they are similar: you get to meet people who really care and know about books, and you get to meet a new community at each one.”