Brooklyn was so much more diverse: on the block where I grew up, there were German people, people from the Dominican Republic, people from Puerto Rico, African-Americans from the South, Caribbean-Americans, Asians.Īfter college at Adelphi University, Woodson went to work for Kirchoff/Wohlberg, a literary agent for children's authors. The city was thriving and fast-moving and electric. The South was so lush and so slow-moving and so much about community. In a 2002 interview with Publishers Weekly she recalled: Woodson's youth was split between South Carolina and Brooklyn. In 2016, she published her first adult novel, Another Brooklyn, and in 2019 she released her second adult novel, Red at the Bone, both to wide praise. She is best known for her 2014 Bown Girl Dreaming, which won the National Book Award and a Newbery Honor. Jacqueline Woodson is an American writer of books for children and teens.

Currently-lives in New York City, New York.

Raised-Geenville, South Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York.

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.Īs 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. 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.

Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the soundtrack of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress.īut the event is not without poignancy. Moving forward and backward in time, with the power of poetry and the emotional richness of a narrative ten times its length, Jacqueline Woodson's extraordinary 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 this child.Īs the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. An extraordinary new novel about the influence of history on a contemporary family, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.

Jacqueline woodson red at the bone