When Melody's mother, Iris, finally experiences real passion at college with a surprising partner, she's blindsided by its force: 'She felt red at the bone - like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.' But it's also a potent expression of raw emotions that aren't easily digested. Woodson's title refers most literally to the unappealing, undercooked chicken flesh close to the bone that Melody is surprised to see the white girls at her private school eating. This deft opener manages to paint the festive scene while immediately putting us on alert with that qualifier, 'But': Things either weren't always so joyous or soon won't be.Ĭhicken bones are scattered through the novel. Music filling the brownstone,' she tells us. The novel begins on a chicken day, when Melody, the daughter of those two hapless teens, is celebrating her 16th birthday at her grandparents' Brooklyn townhouse: 'But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing. In less than 200 sparsely filled pages, this book manages to encompass issues of class, education, ambition, racial prejudice, sexual desire and orientation, identity, mother-daughter relationships, parenthood and loss - yet never feels like a checklist of Important Issues.īooks Where Author Jacqueline Woodson Would Like To Take Young People's Literature In 2018 The narrative nimbly jumps around in time and shifts points of view among five characters who span three generations - the unplanned child of that high school fling and her parents and grandparents - as it builds toward its moving climax. 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.

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