This one felt a little too real to categorize as “Fiction” but the book is marketed as a novel so I guess this is right? It’s a small book, a quick visit into a life, with pretty significant staying power.
Another Brooklyn is the story of a young woman named August returning as an adult to her adolescent home of Brooklyn (I use the word adolescent because it differs from her childhood home in Tennessee, but also a large focus of the book is on how young she is in all these experiences so keep in mind that when I talk about her story in Brooklyn, she’s like twelve years old). Most of the book is told in flashback to her time growing up and her three closest friends.
It’s a hard story about young black girls stripped of their childhoods. These girls are preteens as grown men catcall them and start to grab them from dark stairwells. Childhood is a luxury black girls (and boys, but here specifically girls) are denied and while the details in this story as mostly confined to the shadows and told from afar, that heightens the impact on the reader because it feels as though the author is trying to spare us. There are a few details I’m even still fuzzy on, though I think that’s more about me not wanting to be sure than this book not being clear. This is a hard book, and I’m grateful it’s as short as it was.