Another Brooklyn

Running into a long-ago friend sets memories 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.