When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. In Woodson, at the height of her powers, readers hear the blues: “beneath that joy, such a sadness.”Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Until Melody and Iris can figure each other out.” The thread is held by Iris’ mother, Sabe, who hangs on through her fatal illness “a little while longer. Aubrey and little Melody, holding hands, listen to an old man whose “bottom dentures were loose in his mouth, moving in small circles as he spoke.” The novel itself circles elegantly back to its beginning, Melody and Iris in 2001 for a brava finale, but not before braiding the 1921 Race Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the fires of 9/11.
Woodson’s ear for music-whether Walt Whitman's or A Tribe Called Quest's-is exhilarating, as is her eye for detail. In 21 lyrical chapters, readers hear from both of Iris’ parents, who met at Morehouse, and Aubrey’s mother, CathyMarie, who stretched the margarine and grape jelly sandwiches to see him grown. Iris’ sexual yearning for another girl at Oberlin College gives this novel its title: “She felt red at the bone-like there was something inside of her undone and bleeding.” By then, Iris had all but abandoned toddler Melody and the toddler’s father, Aubrey, in that ancestral brownstone to make her own way. But so, too, she burnishes all her characters’ perspectives. Let me at least have the music.” Woodson famously nails the adolescent voice. And it’s my ceremony and he’s a genius so why are we even still talking about it? You already nixed the words. Melody jabs at her mother, Iris, saying “It’s Prince. She’s 16, making her debut, a “ritual of marking class and time and transition.” She insists that the assembled musicians play Prince’s risqué “Darling Nikki” as she descends. Little girls with purple ribbons and old women with swollen ankles.” For her latest coming-of-age story, Woodson opens in the voice of Melody, waiting on the interior stairs of her grandparents’ brownstone. National Book Award winner Woodson ( Harbor Me, 2018, etc.) returns to her cherished Brooklyn, its “cardinals and flowers and bright-colored cars.
Woodson sings a fresh song of Brooklyn, an aria to generations of an African American family.
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