Red at the Bone: Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020

by Jacqueline Woodson

Bahni Turpin (Narrator), Jacqueline Woodson (Narrator), Peter Francis James (Narrator), Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Narrator), and Shayna Small (Narrator)

Brooklyn, 2001. It is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress - the very same dress that was sewn for a different wearer, Melody's mother, for a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents - from the 1921 Tulsa massacre to post 9/11 New York - Red at the Bone explores sexual desire, identity, class and the life-altering facts of parenthood, as it 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.

• ISBN10: 147461647X
• ISBN13: 9781474616478
• Publish Date: 17 September 2019
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
• Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
• Edition: Unabridged edition
• Format: Audiobook (MP3)
• Duration: 3 hours and 52 minutes
• Language: English

Reviews

[Bianca]

Guess that’s where the tears came from, knowing that there’s so much in this great big world that you don’t have a single ounce of control over. Guess the sooner you learn that, the sooner you’ll have one less heartbreak in your life.

(3.5) Explored themes like class differences, teenage pregnancy, and parenthood. I think it‘s a pretty okay book, I just couldn’t really connect with the characters, this being a short book and with multiple POVs at that. The timelines were quite confusing as well.‬

[jamiereadthis]

Fraught and lyrical. I was thinking I didn’t need the surprise 9/11— again, but then she mirrored it with the Tulsa massacre, and whoa. I’m into the theme of history repeating but also, as with Melody, the choice of taking different paths.

[elvinagb]

I wish I could give it more stars. Absolutely brilliant writing.