Another Brooklyn

Summary (from the publisher): Running into a long-ago friend sets memories from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.

But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.

 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this novel from HarperCollins.

 

Returning to Brooklyn after many years away, August sees a childhood friend on the subway. This chance encounter transports her back to Brooklyn of the 1970s, to a time and place where the friendship between August, Gigi, Sylvia, and Angela was everything - until the friendship splintered apart. But beyond the girls' united front and hopeful outlook there was another Brooklyn, one categorized by sexual and drug abuse, poverty, racial tension, and fractured families.

 

"This is memory" (16). Through August's reflection on her childhood, the reader learns that she moved from Tennessee to Brooklyn with her father and younger brother after her mother had a breakdown. Although initially isolated, August finds her place with the girls she initially only viewed from her apartment window: "Sylvia, Angela, Gigi, August. We were four girls together, amazingly beautiful and terrifyingly alone" (16). Only over the years do August and her friends realize that what they mistake as promises for their future are merely empty dreams; "Maybe this is how it happened first for everyone - adults promising us their own failed futures" (63). What she has been told about her mother is more than it seems, her friendships are not as simple as she assumed, and their burgeoning sexuality alerts them to a hidden world they had previously left undiscovered. Only looking back does August realize how much she didn't know as a child in Brooklyn: "As a child, I had not known the world anthropology or that there was a thing called Ivy League. I had not known that you could spend your days on planes, moving through the world, studying death, your whole life before this life an unanswered question...finally answered" (9). Only slowly does the dark side of her childhood life reveal itself to her. Returning forces her to finally face her feelings towards this complicated childhood realization. 

 

August's story is the breakdown of a once close friendship that coincided with the breakdown of the innocence of her childhood. Just as August can never reclaim her naïve outlook on the world, neither can she resume the friendships that defined her formative years. The betrayals and the rift between the friends is too deep.

 

This was a quick read; I finished it in just two sittings. Indeed, it might be more accurate to classify this as a novella. Although the focus is undeniably on August and her childhood friends, there is much that was left unpacked by the conclusion, including the relationship with her father and brother, her father's adoption of the Islamic faith, and the loss of her mother. Woodson's writing is lyrical and the story is told in fragments and short bursts, which correlates with the way memories come flooding back. A beautiful, fast-paced novel that captures the melancholy feeling of recalling a time, place, and feeling that can never be recovered.

 

Stars: 4