I read, first with irritation but eventually with appreciation, Another Brooklyn, by Jacqueline Woodson. If I had purchased the book, rather than borrowing it from the Boulder Public, I'd be peeved, because it's more of a novella or long short story than a fully-grown novel. Only 165 pages of minibook size(8" x 5"), with spacious margins, large font, and double or triple spacing between frequent one-sentence "paragraphs." The whole could be compressed into 30 normal book size pages. I felt cheated because I want my words worth. But quality should not be measured by quantity, or Mrs. Trollope would be twenty times as good a writer as Jane Austen. Jacqueline Woodson is apparently a very famous novelist, but you wouldn't know it by me, for I had never heard of her, so out-of-date I am. It's a poetic, I think, novel, about "growing up girl in Brooklyn" (white flight Bushwick to be precise) in the 1970s. It's not dense with detail, so each incident has to do a lot of work. It concerns four young girls, each frustrated by the surroundings. The narrator says, "Brooklyn felt like a stone in my throat," but I don't think the novel makes good on that stuck-in-the-craw assertion. It's not, in my opinion, a regional novel; it's a coming of age story with a perennial theme: how do we get out of this constricting space: "Everywhere we looked, we saw people trying to dream themselves out. As though there was something other than this place. As though there was another Brooklyn."
A paragraph that resonated with me, for as an adolescent I myself know only one thing: "I need to get out of here."
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