by Jacqueline Woodson
Riverhead Books
9/1/2020, paperback
SKU: 9780525535287
An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes and explores their histories - reaching back to the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 -- and exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind or divide us from each other, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.
Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson's taut and powerful 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 the new child.
As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. 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.
Unfurling the history of Melody's family - reaching back to the Tulsa race massacre in 1921 -- 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. As 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.
Reviews:
"Beautiful... a generous, big-hearted novel." -- Brit Bennett, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Vanishing Half
"Readers mourning the death of Toni Morrison will find comfort in Sabe's magnificent cadences as she rues her daughter's teen pregnancy, which flies in the face of the lessons her mama ingrained in her from the Tulsa race riots of 1921--the massacre by whites that drove her family north and taught them to vigilantly safeguard their social and economic gains....With Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson has indeed risen--even further into the ranks of great literature." -- NPR
"Occasionally mentioned, and never forgotten, is the fact that Iris's family moved to Brooklyn from the South in 1921 after white people in Tulsa burned down black people's schools, restaurants, and beauty shops. It's not just that the past informs the present, nor is it just that the past isn't past; it's also the case that the past has to be remembered, has to be kept alive." -- The New York Times
About the Author:
Jacqueline Woodson is the bestselling author of more than two dozen award-winning books, including the 2016 New York Times-bestselling National Book Award finalist for adult fiction, Another Brooklyn. Among her many accolades, Woodson is a four-time National Book Award finalist, a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a two-time NAACP Image Award Winner, and a two-time Coretta Scott King Award winner. Her New York Times-bestselling memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, received the National Book Award in 2014. Woodson is also the 2018-2019 National Ambassador for Young People's Literature and the recipient of the 2018 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and the 2018 Children's Literature Legacy Award. In 2015, she was named the Young People's Poet Laureate by the Poetry Foundation. She lives with her family in New York.