Red at the Bone

Starred review from July 15, 2019
Woodson’s beautifully imagined novel (her first novel for adults since 2016’s Another Brooklyn) explores the ways an unplanned pregnancy changes two families. The narrative opens in the spring of 2001, at the coming-of-age party that 16-year-old Melody’s grandparents host for her at their Brooklyn brownstone. A family ritual adapted from cotillion tradition, the event ushers Melody into adulthood as an orchestra plays Prince and her “court” dances around her. Amid the festivity, Melody and her family—her unmarried parents, Iris and Aubrey, and her maternal grandparents, Sabe and Sammy “Po’Boy” Simmons, think of both past and future, delving into extended flashbacks that comprise most of the text. Sabe is proud of the education and affluence she has achieved, but she remains haunted by stories of her family’s losses in the fires of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The discovery that her daughter, Iris, was pregnant at 15 filled her with shame, rage, and panic. After the birth of Melody, Iris, uninterested in marrying mail-room clerk Aubrey, pined for the freedom that her pregnancy curtailed. Leaving Melody to be raised by Aubrey, Sabe, and Po’Boy, she departed for Oberlin College in the early ’90s and, later, to a Manhattan apartment that her daughter is invited to visit but not to see as home. Their relationship is strained as Melody dons the coming-out dress her mother would have worn if she hadn’t been pregnant with Melody. Woodson’s nuanced voice evokes the complexities of race, class, religion, and sexuality in fluid prose and a series of telling details. This is a wise, powerful, and compassionate novel.

Starred review from July 15, 2019
Woodson sings a fresh song of Brooklyn, an aria to generations of an African American family. National Book Award winner Woodson (Harbor Me, 2018, etc.) returns to her cherished Brooklyn, its "cardinals and flowers and bright-colored cars. Little girls with purple ribbons and old women with swollen ankles." For her latest coming-of-age story, Woodson opens in the voice of Melody, waiting on the interior stairs of her grandparents' brownstone. She's 16, making her debut, a "ritual of marking class and time and transition." She insists that the assembled musicians play Prince's risqué "Darling Nikki" as she descends. Melody jabs at her mother, Iris, saying "It's Prince. And it's my ceremony and he's a genius so why are we even still talking about it? You already nixed the words. Let me at least have the music." Woodson famously nails the adolescent voice. But so, too, she burnishes all her characters' perspectives. Iris' sexual yearning for another girl at Oberlin College gives this novel its title: "She felt red at the bone--like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding." By then, Iris had all but abandoned toddler Melody and the toddler's father, Aubrey, in that ancestral brownstone to make her own way. In 21 lyrical chapters, readers hear from both of Iris' parents, who met at Morehouse, and Aubrey's mother, CathyMarie, who stretched the margarine and grape jelly sandwiches to see him grown. Woodson's ear for music--whether Walt Whitman's or A Tribe Called Quest's--is exhilarating, as is her eye for detail. Aubrey and little Melody, holding hands, listen to an old man whose "bottom dentures were loose in his mouth, moving in small circles as he spoke." The novel itself circles elegantly back to its beginning, Melody and Iris in 2001 for a brava finale, but not before braiding the 1921 Race Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the fires of 9/11. The thread is held by Iris' mother, Sabe, who hangs on through her fatal illness "a little while longer. Until Melody and Iris can figure each other out." In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: "beneath that joy, such a sadness."

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 1, 2019
When Woodson's (Another Brooklyn, 2016) emotionally rich third adult novel opens, it's early in the new millennium and Melody is the age her mother, Iris, was when she had her, but doing something Iris never got to do: making a grand entrance at her sixteenth-birthday party in Iris' parents' Brooklyn brownstone. Melody has lived her whole life in Sabe and Po'Boy's home along with her dad, Aubrey, while Iris?whom Melody has called by her first name for as long as she can remember?pursued an independent life, first at Oberlin and then in Manhattan. Time flips forward and back as chapters alternate among the perspectives of Melody, Iris, Aubrey, Sabe, and Po'Boy, their stories interlocking and tunneling through one another for a clear and fuller picture of their family, and all that Melody's pivotal arrival brought to it. Woodson channels deeply true-feeling characters, all of whom readers will empathize with in turn. In spare, lean prose, she reveals rich histories and moments in swirling eddies, while also leaving many fateful details for readers to divine.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

July 17, 2020

This quick novel opens with Melody's coming-of-age ceremony. She is 16, the same age her mother was when she gave birth to her. Woodson weaves together the perspectives of three generations, alternating among Melody, her parents, and her grandparents. VERDICT This is a story of adolescence told from multiple generational vantage points.-Elliot Riley, Deerfield Academy, MA

Copyright 2020 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 27, 2019

One could do no better justice to this stunning book from the multi-award-crowned Woodson (Another Brooklyn) than to quote its dedication: "For the ancestors, a long long line of you bending and twisting bending and twisting." That quote exemplifies the sense of family, of connectedness, of endurance that is the legacy of Woodson's characters, further captured when our young heroine Melody says, "Maybe this was the moment when I knew I was part of a long line of almost erased stories." The narrative opens with Melody celebrating her 16th birthday at her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone, wearing the white dress originally made for Melody's mother, Iris, for her own 16th birthday celebration, which never took place because she was pregnant with Melody. Before the ceremony, Iris, heretofore an indifferent mother, urgently tries to impart a sense of heightened expectation and responsibility to an exasperated Melody, which launches the family stories at the heart of the book, from Melody's grandparents barely surviving the 1921 Tulsa race riots to Iris's pregnancy, refusal to marry Melody's father, and determination to regain the freedom she might have lost with Melody's birth. VERDICT An aching story of family and class, ambition and gentrification, sexual desire and what motherhood really means, rendered in beautifully precise language. [See Prepub Alert, 3/4/19.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.