Every character comes to life with their unique, first-person voices and as the novel progresses, I found their losses personal and deeply touching. As Woodson’s prose jump between characters in Melody’s family tree, the reader empathizes, suffers, and laughs with each of them. The novel opens in 2001 as Melody prepares to come-of-age in a traditional ceremony, one her conception interrupted for her own mother sixteen years prior. Red at the Bone alternates in point of view between sixteen-year-old Melody, her parents, and her grandparents. At the same moment, loyal, loving, at-risk Aubrey finds his way into their family by loving Iris and fathering her baby at age sixteen. Grand/father, Po’Boy, and Sabe provide a comfortable, respectable home to their only child, Iris, which her teenage pregnancy shatters then uproots.

Grand/mother Sabe’s two-year-old mother was left scarred as a child from the fires of Tulsa in 1921, and forced with her family to migrate north eighty years later, Sabe swears she will never return to Oklahoma. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep, and it carries even more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American.

#read #booksofinstagram #booklovers,#classicbooks #morebooks #bookobsessed,#bookmemes #bookaholic #thrillerbookJacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book. 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 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. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. 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.

Woodson red at the bone