When Jacqueline Woodson accepted her 2014 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for “Brown Girl Dreaming,” her memoir in verse of growing up in South Carolina and Brooklyn in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, she thanked her mother for being part of the Great Migration that brought Woodson and her siblings to New York City, and told the audience, “It’s so important that we talk to our old people before they become ancestors, and get their stories.”


From the first page of “Another Brooklyn,” her first novel for adults in two decades, we find evidence of an author once again engaged in excavating family narratives, and in exploring the painful experience of making her way as a black girl in America. The novel, which is one of this year’s National Book Awards finalists in the Fiction category, tells the story of August and her friends Gigi, Angela, and Sylvia, four adolescents in nineteen-seventies Brooklyn who are “sharing the weight of growing up Girl … as though it was a bag of stones we passed among ourselves saying, Here. Help me carry this.” It is a book, Woodson writes in an author’s note, for which she mined her own teen-age years in New York, revisiting “the slow-motion ferocity of the end of childhood.” Check 2016 National Book Award.capital hill cashgate scandal, cashgate scandal malawi, cashgate scandal joyce banda, scandal joyce banda, Capital Hill Cashgate Scandal Officer