It reads like poetry and drama, a cry from the heart that often cuts close to the bone. Red at the Bone should win Woodson plenty of new fans. Perfect for the legions of young women who have graduated from Woodson's middle grade and adolescent fiction, this compact novel focuses on the decisions we make in life, often under duress, or before we can fully understand their consequences. What we have here is an exquisitely wrought tale of two urban black families - one headed by a prosperous, devoted couple, the other by a struggling single mother - whose lives become permanently intertwined when their only children conceive a child in their teens. With this new novel for adults, Woodson continues her sensitive exploration of what it means to be a black girl in America. Red at the Bone follows Woodson's National Book Award-winning memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, and her critically acclaimed novel Another Brooklyn, which in turn followed more than two dozen popular young adult novels, several of which received Newbery awards. Jacqueline Woodson begins her powerful new novel audaciously, with the word 'But.' Well, there are no buts about this writer's talent. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. 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.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Red at the Bone Author Jacqueline Woodson 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 music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress.

It's 2001, the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020Īn 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.

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