This week: Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

Sometimes a book pulls you in from the very first moment. Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, begins with a dedication

“For Bushwick (1970-1990) In Memory”

Bushwick is a northern Brooklyn, NY neighborhood bordered by Ridgewood (Queens), Williamsburg, East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville. Those first words had me swimming in the notion of a place intimately personified, and a place lost and irretrievable. Even in that dedication line there is foreboding sense of a complex relationship with a place that it can never again be what it was.

Another Brooklyn is a story told in pieces—not really fragments, more like little prayers that have a connecting thread. There is a sense of looking back, through, and out in this first person narration of a childhood from age eight to about fourteen. The adult narrator has some of the perspective of distance and time but without losing any of the immediacy. So the narrator is not wise to or critical of herself as a child but gently observational, with plenty of room for expressing profound pain and profound joy.

“I was beginning to hate them. I was beginning to love them.”

The novel’s voice (like everything Woodson writes) is masterful. Every single one of these prayer-like pieces of the story sing. The novel holds onto one childlike or maybe dreamlike notion about the narrator’s mother, and it makes for a kind of frame for the story almost all of the way through. It’s just one of the uncountable beautiful things about this book.

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Bushwick is in my heart, I lived there from 2007-2010 because I could see the sky there, and ride my mountain bike around more easily on the wider streets. I loved the way the elevated train seemed to shake the whole world, but more than anything, at that time I was drawn to living with and around other artists who were occupying awkward shared spaces, converted industrial against code or otherwise illegal probably, and showing art in unexpected places. The Bushwick I knew died too, but that’s a whole other story.