I was moved by Woodson’s poetic language and her ability to weave together a story that is compassionate and eye-opening at the same time. The four main characters start from the same geographic place, but life takes them in wildly different directions. Woodson’s novel is at some times full of hope and beauty, and at others deeply tragic. She has a chance encounter with a childhood friend, and it sets off a chain of memories and reminiscences that tell her life story.Īs a girl growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s, August and her vibrant group of girlfriends, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi, learn together what it means to be women and women of color in the city. The main character of the book is a woman named August who has returned to her home in Brooklyn for her father’s funeral. I haven’t read Brown Girl Dreaming yet, although I’d like to instead, I settled on Another Brooklyn because Woodson read sections of this novel during her session at the convention. Perhaps her most famous book is Brown Girl Dreaming, which is a YA novel about her own life told in verse. Woodson is a highly prolific and much-celebrated writer of young adult fiction. But I’ll spare you the professional details and skip right to the book review, which is why you’re here, right? During one of the plenary sessions, the featured speaker was Jacqueline Woodson. 🙂īut the conference really is a big deal–there are literally hundreds of break-out sessions on everything from grammar to the literary canon. The first time I went, in 2016, I referred to it as “the big one,” and my friends and family mocked me for that huge display of nerdiness. If you’re unfamiliar with NCTE, it stands for the National Council of Teachers of English, and their annual conference is a pretty big deal. Back in November of last year I attended NCTE’s huge annual conference.

Another brooklyn book review