Jacqueline Woodson begins her powerful new novel audaciously, with the word 'But.' Well, there are no buts about this writer's talent ... Woodson continues her sensitive exploration of what it means to be a black girl in America ... an exquisitely wrought tale ... should win Woodson plenty of new fans. It reads like poetry and drama, a cry from the heart that often cuts close to the bone. The narrative nimbly jumps around in time and shifts points of view among five characters who span three generations as it builds toward its moving climax. 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 ... There isn't a character in this book you don't come to care about, even when you question their choice ... Woodson's language is beautiful throughout Red at the Bone, but it positively soars in the sections written from Iris' mother's point of view. Readers mourning the death of Toni Morrison will find comfort in Sabe's magnificent cadences as she rues her daughter's teen pregnancy ... With Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson has indeed risen — even further into the ranks of great literature.
... profoundly moving ... urgent, vital insights into questions of class, gender, race, history, queerness and sex in America ... part of the miracle of Red at the Bone is its evident, steady respect for Iris’s wants, the narrative primacy given to hungers that might not, to many, seem acceptable ... Again and again, in rich detail, Woodson gives life to Iris’s growing desires ... to depict a mother eager to leave her baby is a far less told story, and it’s astonishing, it’s a feat, to see how lovingly, even joyfully, Woodson sees Iris’s desires through ... With its abiding interest in the miracle of everyday love, Red at the Bone is a proclamation.
... as moody, spare, and intense as a Picasso line drawing. In just under 200 pages [Woodson] confronts the indelible marks of youthful indiscretions and the way we explain our adolescence to our adult self in lovely, granular mise-en-scènes ... The beauty of this work is in its velvety shifts from the past to the present. Woodson shows that to understand the soul of a woman, we must understand the heart of the girl she once was ... This poignant tale of choices and their aftermath, history and its legacy, will resonate with mothers and daughters. There is pain on these pages, but hope glimmers between the lines. If trauma is a cursed heirloom handed down through the decades, maybe love is the cure passed upward from the young to the old, a bright promise that gleams like a hidden bar of gold.
... a lovely, heart-wrenching coming-of-age story that spans generations ... [a] remarkably economic narrative ... As the years pass, the desires, ambitions and foibles of all the characters emerge gently but persistently. Woodson’s writing is so lyrical and touching that it can make a reader ache ... a beautiful analysis of adolescence, sexual desire, parenthood and self-discovery through the lens of one American family.
Ms. Woodson takes you into the thoughts of each character, making the pages come alive with her descriptive text ... One of the strengths of the book is how Ms. Woodson includes the music of the time to transport the reader to that era ... One topic that hit home was 9/11 and how tragedy affected everyone from every background. Ms. Woodson shows how this tragedy touched us all ... This book is highly recommended. It will have you laughing and crying at the same time.
Jacqueline Woodson’s third adult novel, Red at the Bone, is a rare bird indeed ... A miracle of compressions, it demands and rewards close attention ... Full of tragedy and triumph, loss and discovery, poetry and music, Woodson’s slim volume contains multitudes.
...haunting ... There is an abundance of angst over class, gender and race subtly woven into this beguilingly slim novel. Woodson frames each chapter from the point of view of a different character, and the result is a narrative about an individual family that takes on communal urgency and power. She shows her readers how elliptical and obsessive human memory is. The precarious dance between intelligence and emotions makes it difficult to unravel the whole truth because no two characters experience the past in the same way. The past, however, informs their present ... Black women and their sexuality – what is projected on to it; its weight, beauty and ease – are at the heart of Red at the Bone. Woodson seems to understand that there has never been a way for youth or love or desire to play it safe. A young girl’s sexuality is hers to discover, and not her parents’, nor her lovers’, to assume or take away. It is the mystery that keeps unravelling, like blood, truth and memory.
... dazzling ... Woodson's inimitable style — jazzy, melodious, allusive, at times bordering on poetry or music ... Miraculously, Woodson manages to use this one particular Brooklyn family as a prism through which she explores profound generational differences in attitudes toward race, class, gender and sexuality.
A treasure awaits readers who encounter Red at the Bone ... both a uniquely black story about multigenerational love and upward mobility–and a universal American tale of striving, failing, then trying again ... the author refines the talent for finding precise language to describe overwhelm and passion, confusion and potential she exhibited in [Brown Girl Dreaming]. In about 200 pages, we are met with Woodson’s vast range, insight and tenderness, particularly in her treatment of young people carrying the weight of old souls ... In telling this story, Woodson sees to it that we remember that in spite of our circumstances, for good or for bad, we go on.
... does much more than perfectly balance truth with hope ... Red at the Bone showed me something I didn’t realize I needed in a book: home ... Because throughout their trials, tribulations and triumphs, the people in this book were my people. This family, my family. Their ups, their downs, their pains, their pleasures, I have known them like I know my own skin. Their history is my history ... a narrative steeped in truth — and, yes, it’s painful. But it’s also one of healing and hope ... Thank you, Ms. Woodson, for leading me home.
... profound, moving and consistently unexpected ... Iris is a difficult, brilliantly realised character, and one whom the author never judges ... a book that embraces class, desire, race, gender, ambition and tragedy, all with exemplary subtlety. The word 'margarine', for instance, conveys a world of socioeconomic differences; the fierceness with which a baby latches on contains all the seeds of a complex mother-daughter relationship ... pure poetry, filled with incantatory repetitions, soaring cadences, burnished images. There is laughter and spirit, 'fire and ash and loss', blocks of gold hidden beneath squeaky stairs. It’s a story laden with stories, too. As Sabe says, 'If a body’s to be remembered, someone has to tell its story.' Woodson does just that, weaving a narrative whose specificity yields an undeniable universality. We grownups have been missing out.
... tender and evocative ... should be required reading for any author who believes a successful multigenerational saga must be sprawling and unwieldy ... Music infuses the novel, from the Prince tune of the opening party to Aubrey’s absent jazz trumpeter father; from Melody’s very name to the vivacious rhythm of Woodson’s words. Her writing sings out, impassioned, drawing you on, varying and expanding themes, until you’re immersed in these lives.
Red at the Bone’s characters are bound to one another, yet how they choose to assert their individuality rings true ... Woodson’s tight prose and attention to emotional detail create a moving family portrait of society and ambition. She brilliantly crafts a tale that is connected to Black culture and experience, while foregrounding universal themes like intergenerational tension. In Aubrey, Woodson’s written one of the most dynamic male characters in years; the way he wears his emotions close to the surface will elicit tears more than once ... does not deliver a clean narrative; the reader will close the book with the sense that the story will continue. And that feels like the entire point. This is a snapshot of a family over the course of one century across three generations. The story doesn’t begin with Sabe’s family fleeing Tulsa, and it doesn’t end with Melody. By offering a textured glimpse into one family’s life, Woodson offers a truly beautiful and meaningful narrative.
Its vast emotional depth, rich historical understanding and revelatory pacing lure the reader into the tender makeup of one family’s origin and promise ... As the novel progresses, the perspectives flow in and out of chronological order ... Woodson masterfully yields the story to its natural flow; someone’s death might be revealed in one section only for the catalyst, the early traces of it, to unfold later. Here, her signature recasting of time emphasizes how vulnerable we all are without knowing ... The book is infused with history, with the overt and subtle racism passed down through generations, with the full expression of blackness that has soared anyway.
Woodson challenges the notion that women have to be mothers in any traditional sense, while also showing the pain her mother's choices causes Melody ... Woodson, a master of juggling multiple voices, gives life to the hopes and emotional wounds of each character ... a remarkable, intergenerational harmony of voices. At its center is hope for both individual and hereditary survival. But Woodson most poignantly portrays the brutality and liberty of a woman putting herself first.
...sublime ...[There are] many instances in which Red at the Bone deepens and surprises ... This short novel contains immense empathy for each member of its wide ensemble. Thus, as Woodson covers nearly a century, from the 1921 Tulsa race massacre to 9/11, her grasp of history’s weight on individuals — and definitive feel for borough life, past and present — proves to be as emotionally transfixing as ever.
... [Woodson] combine[s] unique details of her characters’ lives with the sounds, sights and especially music of their surroundings, creating stories that are both deeply personal and remarkably universal ... Though Red at the Bone> lacks the cohesion of Woodson’s previous work, this lyrical, lightly told coming-of-age story is bound to satisfy.
Red at the Bone is a novel packed with layers, and adds to the canon of literature that highlights an accurate account of Black family life. If I had to summarize it in a few words, I would say it is a literary representation of Black feminist traditions and thought. Woodson marks the personal as political by showing how manifold girlhood, womanhood, sexuality, and motherhood are for Black women. These beautiful pages illuminate how race and class are experienced in gendered, patterned ways for Black women and men. In short, Woodson produces knowledge about Black Americans that pays homage to family history, historical context, and intersectionality—forms of analyses that mark a writer worthy of Black feminist theorizing ... I appreciate Woodson for taking me on an intellectually stimulating journey of highs and lows.
Red at the Bone is a nuanced portrait of shifting family relationships, jumping back and forth in time and moving between the characters’ different voices. Woodson is a writer accomplished at shifting from one register to another ... So it is perhaps no surprise that the pressure and urgency of Melody’s teenage self draws the reader into the novel ... Underneath it all runs the vexed and violent history of the US ... The US has been subject to all kinds of violence: the novel is set in 2001 for a reason, though it would be unkind to give that reason away. With passionate precision Woodson paints the aches and pleasures of all kinds of love: parental love, the love of friendship, sexual love.
Woodson’s elegant multigenerational tale, her second novel for adults, begins eighty years to the day after the Black Wall Street Massacre ... Red at the Bone could so easily have become an elegy for thwarted expectations; that’s the punitive arc we have come to expect from tales of unplanned pregnancy – the tragedy of squandered potential, mitigated only by the redemptive purity of a child’s love. But Woodson – beloved by YA readers for her non-judgemental fiction – has never been interested in such didacticism ... It is rare to read an American novel that talks so unsqueamishly about class, and the systems – from the well-intentioned to the malignantly racist – that stymie upward mobility in black communities. It is rarer still to read a novel of unpunished maternal reluctance ... It is in telling Iris’s story – not as one of callous abandonment but of self-protection and queer desire – that Woodson’s novel shows its red-raw heart.
...a lyrical novel told from multiple points of view ... These are characters who come to life on the page, each with their unique voice, profoundly connected to family, born and bereft, living and dead. Woodson writes with such rhythms that you will continue to hear their voices echo after you have turned the last page of this slim, rich novel. I marked passage after passage of beautiful writing and am eager to read her other novels and her memoir.
...emotionally rich ... 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.
...[a] beautifully imagined novel ... 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.
Woodson sings a fresh song of Brooklyn, an aria to generations of an African American family ... Woodson’s ear for music—whether Walt Whitman's or A Tribe Called Quest's—is exhilarating, as is her eye for detail ... 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 ... In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: 'beneath that joy, such a sadness.'
