Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION WOO | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Author Notes
Jacqueline Woodson was born in Columbus, Ohio on February 12, 1963. She received a B.A. in English from Adelphi University in 1985. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked as a drama therapist for runaways and homeless children in New York City. Her books include The House You Pass on the Way, I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, Lena, and The Day You Begin. She won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2001 for Miracle's Boys. After Tupac and D Foster, Feathers, and Show Way won Newbery Honors. Brown Girl Dreaming won the E. B. White Read-Aloud Award in 2015. Her other awards include the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. She was also selected as the Young People's Poet Laureate in 2015 by the Poetry Foundation.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Acclaimed young-adult writer Woodson (Maizon at Blue Hill) crosses over to adult fiction with this family novel that's brilliant, moving, semi-surreal-and daring, as the author fearlessly loads her palette with words that can offer great color but little sense. Set in Brooklyn mostly during the Vietnam war, the story opens on a nameless black narrator, who's in the fifth grade, and her four siblings, then lets 12 years pass like gray pages of a tabloid. Chapters come in small chunks broken off from the narrator's nerve-tossed heart. Her new baby brother, Cory, is half white (and ``the proof that a black man can't leave his woman for one minute without her making a fool out of him,'' says her annoyed father). Her gay eldest brother, Troy, spends his last night home before going to Vietnam prancing around the kids' bedroom in his mother's high heels. Her third brother, Carlos, has blue eyes whose origin baffles him, and her mother falls into a bad mood and for a week saturates herself with a new Al Green record. Nearly every stage of the narrator's growth is a kind of death, though punctuated by falling in love and by traveling to Coney Island, Cape Cod and the Statue of Liberty. Troy comes home in a casket. Daddy drinks, beats Mama, slips off. Mama gets a bad job with the phone company, then loses her voice forever, while the narrator comes into puberty and ever increasing understanding that this ``world can hold a million little girls in its hand. This world can drop them.'' QPB featured alternate. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Woodson still has one foot in the young adult world of her earlier novels (I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This, p. 782, etc.) with this dreamy, sometimes too spare story of an African-American girl growing up in Brooklyn from 1966 to 1978. Early on, the unnamed narrator's older sister, Angel, claims that with a little effort their family could be like the Brady Bunch, but the text slowly reveals how far that is from the truth. Angel and her sister have three brothers: Troy, a gay teenager who goes to Vietnam to prove his manhood; Carlos, who is sexually abusive from an early age; and Cory, who is apparently the son of their mother and another man. The narrator's cool observation of her own emerging sexuality and the sexual behavior of those around her is the most appealing aspect here. Woodson has an infallible ear for dialogue among children, in particular the way they talk (often with naive brilliance) about sex. During a playground discussion in which young girls touch edgily on the subject of sexual abuse, one who tries to speak concretely about her experience is cut off: `` `So what?' someone says. `Like it don't happen to everybody?' '' In another episode, the ten-year-old narrator and a friend named Olga straddle each other in a basement to get ``the feeling,'' until Catholic Olga realizes with horror that they're carrying on next to an altar. Chapters build on each other, but the information provided is too scanty to really create any depth. In its absence, Woodson attempts to goose the narrative with dramatic incidents, or events that on the surface seem harmless but have danger rumbling underneath. The wistful tone is not enough to sustain momentum, since it is never entirely clear what these characters want. Ultimately, these are finely written vignettes that just miss meshing into something more forceful. A photograph that fades too quickly.
Booklist Review
Woodson's little novel is a coming-of-age story set in the Vietnam era, when the picture-perfect Brady Bunch set a national standard for the ideal family. Her heroine-narrator, a little African American girl, has another kind of family. She has an older brother who's a drag queen. Her younger, half-white half-brother is an endless reminder to her father of her mother's infidelity. Mother, who presses dolls on the less than enthusiastic narrator, plays Al Green records over and over and slowly waltzes with the broom, encased in her own world, wearing panties on her head when she can't find a scarf. Woodson brings the narrator to her mid-teens, poised on the brink of an awakening, struggling to come to terms with her sexuality, and literally screaming to leave her earlier life behind, "where we're the pitiful ones." This faux memoir, told with painful clarity and fervor, deserves its share of general readers as well as those who home in on women's and African American literature. ~--Whitney Scott
