Good Reads  /  Community Library Notes
The Way to the Spring
​Ben Ehrenreich
Review by Priscilla Comen

​“Another Brooklyn” by Jacqueline Woodson is a moving novel about a girl named August and her friends Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi who roam the streets of Brooklyn in the 1970s. They watch the white people move out of the neighborhood in their station wagons and moving vans. August’s mother has “walked into water," but August hopes she’ll return one day. She tells her little brother as they watch out their window, “She’ll be back tomorrow and tomorrow.” They watch the ice cream truck drive by, and the children laugh and play in the street below.
     In time, their father allows them to go outside their apartment, and August joins her girlfriends in wanting to become grown up. Later, Gigi attends a different school, one that stresses performing arts, and Sylvia goes to Catholic school. As the girls mature, the reader’s heart aches for them. They practice slow dancing and French kissing. Angela’s mother is found dead on the roof, and Angela is taken away to a foster home or to an aunt’s. They don’t know.
     Sadness is palpable in this book and author Woodson is in charge of it. She makes us feel the sorrow as the girls grow. Woodson knows these characters well and makes sure we do too. What will become of them? Will they leave Brooklyn? Where will they go and with whom? Author Woodson has won many awards and we can see the reason. She’s a young light on the horizon of writers. Find this one on the new fiction shelf of your community library.