A review by jenkepesh
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

3.0

This slim not-exactly-a-novel sketches the lives of an African-American family transitioning with society from roots in the Tulsa Massacre to middle-class prosperity in Brooklyn. Woodson writes in the voices of a sixteen-year-old girl coming out in society, as well as the voice of each of her parents and three of her grandparents, moving back and forth in their lives mostly through memories. The debutante, Melody, is loved and cosseted by her prosperous-against-the-odds family, but her start was tough: mother Iris was a teen mother who stayed long enough to get her high school degree and then fled to Oberlin College to move on with her life, while dad Aubrey stays with his daughter in Iris’s parents’ house, working a blue-collar job in a banking concern. Each of the characters struggles with identity and belonging within their family and with the social scars of racism. Ultimately, Woodson’s choice to spend so little time with any one character, or even to characters emotionally (they tell their emotions in memory, but do little direct interaction), had me reading this book as if touring Woodson’s touchstone experiences but either the characters are too close to her own life for her to be able to provide a complete story, or they are too much Types to be deeply thought through.