Event Description
The Intercultural Book Circle will be meeting on Wednesday, February 14, at 12 p.m. in the James E. Marks Intercultural Center (3225 Arch Street) for a discussion of “Another Brooklyn” by Jacqueline Woodson, which is also this year’s selection for One Book One Philadelphia. Lunch will be served and, as always, the first 30 people to RSVP to jkrohn@drexel.edu can claim a free copy of the book.
As part of One Book One Philadelphia, this Book Circle will be part of a slate of events celebrating “Another Brooklyn” at Drexel; more details will follow. A synopsis of “Another Brooklyn” is below:
Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.
But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion.
Like Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives. |
