Woodson's second novel for adults opens in 2001 at a Brooklyn brownstone, where sixteen-year-old Melody is making her entrance at a coming-of-age ceremony in a dress sewn sixteen years earlier for her mother, Iris — a ceremony Iris never had, because she was pregnant with Melody. Moving backward and forward in time and among five narrators across three generations, the novel reconstructs how two Black families of different classes were joined by Iris and Aubrey's teenage pregnancy: Aubrey, who stayed and raised Melody, Iris, who left for college, and the grandparents, including a family history reaching back to the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. In under two hundred pages Woodson takes up class, education, sexuality, gentrification, ambition, and parenthood, asking what young people owe to plans made before they knew who they were.
Author: Jacqueline Woodson · Original publisher: Riverhead Books (New York), 2019
