Simply put, we are booksellers. No if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Our joy comes from having a customer rave about a book recommendation, gaining new insight about a topic after discussing a book with another reader, or getting the chance to meet an author we’ve been secretly fanboy-ing/fangirl-ing over.
So imaging our collective glee when we found out Ms. Woodson — Jacqueline if you’re a reader — wanted to stop by to sign copies of her new book, Red to the Bone. It’s a great feeling to know that people you respect also consider the work you do to be important and impactful. The most important thing you can give a person is your time. We appreciate Jacqueline for taking time out to hang with us last week and autograph books.
“This poignant tale of choices and their aftermath, history and legacy, will resonate with mothers and daughters.” -Tayari Jones, bestselling author of An American Marriage, in O Magazine
Woodson’s book has been receiving rave reviews and we think you’re going to love it well. Stop by the store to pick up this autographed ‘Book Gem’ for your library or go online to order your today.
Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson’s taut and powerful 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 the new 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 music 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.
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