thebookwormofnotredame's review
I can’t rate this book because it’s not something I usually read and therefor didn’t enjoy it, but I recognise it’s well written and will be seen as a very good book for many other people.
bellaruffell's review
5.0
The book opens on the evening of a 16 year old girls coming of age ceremony in her grandparents house. This book unfurls the history of Melody’s parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment.
I loved everything about this book. It is beautifully written and the characters have been made so authentic and real. This book explores so many important themes such as mother/ daughter relationship, teenage pregnancy, ambition, fatherhood and sexual identity. Woodson managers to provoke emotions that change as the story progresses. It is such an insight into how young people make decisions about their lives, things that will affect them in the future, not realizing what that entails.
Red at the bone will mesmerize you with its spellbinding tale how people from different origins and backgrounds come together, love, create a new life, stay or go their different ways and continue living. This is one of my favourites of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.
I loved everything about this book. It is beautifully written and the characters have been made so authentic and real. This book explores so many important themes such as mother/ daughter relationship, teenage pregnancy, ambition, fatherhood and sexual identity. Woodson managers to provoke emotions that change as the story progresses. It is such an insight into how young people make decisions about their lives, things that will affect them in the future, not realizing what that entails.
Red at the bone will mesmerize you with its spellbinding tale how people from different origins and backgrounds come together, love, create a new life, stay or go their different ways and continue living. This is one of my favourites of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020.
dcato526's review
5.0
I absolutely loved this book but sad it was so short. I loved the poetic and lyrical writing, the integration of historical events, the character development and the emotions and thoughts it provoked. This is my first book by Jacqueline Woodson. I will definitely read another.
openmypages's review
4.0
This is a hard story to rate. I enjoyed every second of reading it, the writing was beautiful and poetic. I loved the multiple POVs and identified with each character in different ways. It's a story about familial relations, finding yourself and learning to live with the consequences of your decisions. I so wholeheartedly identify with Melody and her struggles to feel bonded to and loved by her mother. And yet I also identify with Iris's need to make something of herself and escape her small world to find herself. I didn't really have the other strong family support that Melody did but I so enjoyed her family member's stories and how they were drawn to love and protect her. This is a great easy read that is a beautiful dip into a culture other than my own and yet is so easily relatable as my story.
emilymaye's review
Told in sparse paragraphs but with full language, like only the best bits you underline in a book. Woodson weaves together the many stories of a multi-generational black family as, across time, everyone navigates their own relationship with identity, gentrification, parenthood, class, and that red-to-the-bone feeling that comes with love.
black_girl_reading's review
5.0
Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone had me missing my family like no other. About a family of refugees from the Tulsa massacre who end up in Brooklyn, this book is about Black identity and community forged through bonds of love, through enduring self preservation, through knowing what is safe and what is yours, through wanting better for yours, and through a grounded strength even in times of enormous tragedy. Most of all though, this book is an exploration of the ties that bind a family, and of the decisions that fracture it in the face of a teenage pregnancy and the life that comes out of it. This book was lyrical, it was visceral, it resonated part of my own family and I felt it right down into my own bones. I loved it, and even more so, I loved listening to it - it was narrated by multiple voice actors, our faves among them, and also by Woodson herself. Do yourself a favour and get this book. Thank you @librofm for this audiobook, opinions are my own.