The release date for the English version of 'Red at the Bone' by
Jacqueline Woodson is Sep 2019. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
Through a combination of time travel and forward thinking, Jacqueline Woodson's gripping and compelling new book reveals the influence of history and community on the choices, relationships, and experiences of these families as well as the life of the newborn.
The novel begins in 2001 on the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming-of-age celebration in the Brooklyn brownstone of her grandparents. She enters to the sound of Prince, surrounded by her loved ones, wearing a unique dress that was custom-made. Nonetheless, there is poignancy to the incident. That same dress was measured and made sixteen years before for Melody's mother, who was planning a ceremony but it never happened.
As Woodson reveals Melody's parents' and grandparents' past to demonstrate how they all got here, she takes into account not just their aspirations and accomplishments but also the price they had to pay for trying to defy expectations and buck the tide of time. Red at the Bone most strikingly examines the ways in which young people must frequently make life-changing decisions, often before they have had a chance to come to terms with their sexual desires and identities, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the realities of parenthood.