Jacqueline Woodson

Harvard Book Store welcomes renowned, bestselling writer JACQUELINE WOODSON—author of the highly acclaimed Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming—for a discussion of her latest novel, Red at the Bone.

About Red at the Bone

Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. Moving forward and backward in time, with the power of poetry and the emotional richness of a narrative ten times its length, Jacqueline Woodson's extraordinary new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of this child.

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the soundtrack of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony—a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives—even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

Praise for Red at the Bone

"[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." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Woodson famously nails the adolescent voice. But so, too, she burnishes all her characters' perspectives. . . In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: ‘beneath that joy, such a sadness.'" —Kirkus, starred review 

"[A] remarkable and moving portrait of a family in a changing Brooklyn. . . There's not a single unnecessary word." —Refinery29