“The desire was like nothing she’d ever known,” Woodson explains. Iris has birthed her child, but realizes she still wants to go to college she wants more than Aubrey, doesn’t love him enough “to walk through the rest of her life with him.” She sees past college, too, imagining “some fancy job somewhere where she dressed cute and drank good wine at a restaurant after work.”Īgain and again, in rich detail, Woodson gives life to Iris’s growing desires: Iris immerses herself in her high school studies, reading Shakespeare and the Brontës while Aubrey sleeps, infant Melody on his chest. All, it seems, could be well.īut it turns out that Iris craves more than a family life confined to her parents’ house, and part of the miracle of “Red at the Bone” is its evident, steady respect for Iris’s wants, the narrative primacy given to hungers that might not, to many, seem acceptable. Aubrey falls powerfully in love with his daughter, and with being a parent, and he moves into Iris’s family’s house in Brooklyn. Resolutely pushing through her family’s resistance, Iris proceeds to have the baby her disapproving parents soften as soon as they see the infant’s “half-open eyes slide over” to them. I wanted you growing in my body, I wanted you in my arms, I wanted you over my shoulder,” Iris tells her daughter, Melody, years later. Iris is from a life and family in which, “even as a child, she’d never doubted that she’d one day go to college”: Having a baby at 16 was never part of the plan.

“Red at the Bone” centers on two black families who come together when a girl and a boy in high school, Iris and Aubrey, become pregnant. “Red at the Bone” is her second novel for adults, with urgent, vital insights into questions of class, gender, race, history, queerness and sex in America. Image Award winner, a beloved writer with millions of copies of her books in print. Woodson has written more than two dozen books, many of them award-winning in 2014, she won the National Book Award for young people’s literature for her memoir, “Brown Girl Dreaming.” She is also a four-time National Book Award finalist and a two-time N.A.A.C.P. But what if that departure isn’t necessarily monstrous what if the wound of maternal abandonment could be not only alleviated, but also, perhaps, healed by other kinds of love? This possibility underlies Jacqueline Woodson’s much anticipated, profoundly moving novel “Red at the Bone.” Is there a more fraught, vilified figure in American letters - in worldwide letters, perhaps - than the mother who abandons a child? To be a mother who goes away, physically or emotionally, is widely considered to be a mother who turns monstrous, a towering figure who inflicts enduring, ne plus ultra pain upon the offspring she leaves behind.

Book red at the bone