Red at the Bone, Jacqueline Woodson

Elizabeth Catlett, Portfolio Cover, 1970s

(February 3) Recommended on the Goop Instagram as follows: "In 2001, sixteen-year-old Melody is walking down the stairs at her grandparents’ house in Brooklyn for her coming-of-age ceremony. Sixteen years earlier, her own mother Iris, pregnant, missed her party. Cutting back and forth in time, and from character to character, Jacqueline Woodson explores all the different moments, all the beginnings that lead a family to a particular moment in time. It’s a novel about history, class and status, and the ways we try to escape and cling to our identity. We still can’t believe a story so epic fit into just 200 pages", a perfect summary.

I liked it fine... the cutting back and forth through time and all the slightly different repetitions of key events in the lives of different characters gives the novel the quality of a Cubist painting like Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), like you're actually able to see motion in a static thing, or, here, feel the passage of many generations in 200 pages. Of course it's interesting how the generations differ from each other even though they mirror one another.

I definitely felt I was given authentic tastes of Black culture in Brooklyn from the '60s through to the '90s.