Many things are described as ‘halfway’ to something, there are recurring mentions of wholeness, a refrain between August and her brother: Music is a regular, important theme, and its role in forming identity the unreliability of memory, of reconstructed stories about ourselves. There are so many themes which come up repeatedly in here, and so many that I’d need another read (and another, and another) to see properly. Woodson gives a masterclass in condensed prose, in writing which is brief but encapsulates a huge amount of feeling. Reading this book felt like one breath, although I stopped a lot to scribble thoughts on post-its. of Speculation, this is first person all the way through, whereas Cove shifts voice and tone regularly. This layout also reminded me of Cynan Jones’ Cove, but the prose here does something very different – like Dept. The writing is lyrical and intensely rhythmical, intertwining with the themes of music which crop up again and again.

The prose is formatted so that the paragraphs have a gap between them and the layout is not all that bears a resemblance to poetry.

of Speculation by Jenny Offill, which was one of my favourite reads last year. The style of this book reminded me of Dept. It is rich with beautiful and brutal moments which connect into a richly moving novel. After reading the first sentence, I fell a little bit in love and couldn’t leave without it…įor a long time my mother wasn’t dead yet.ĭo you ever pick up a book and get a tingly feeling of fate? A little funny instinct that somehow this story will be important to you.Īnother Brooklyn is the story of a friendship between four girls, as August looks back to growing up in the 1970s. I hadn’t heard of the book itself, but had heard of Woodson’s memoir Brown Girl Dreaming.

I picked this up on a bookshop browse a few weeks ago in the new fiction section.

Another brooklyn book review