Growing up in Brooklyn during the Vietnam War, a young woman witnesses the tearing apart of her family by anger, finances, and the draft, and when her parents fail to offer support and guidance, she struggles with society's mixed messages. 15,000 first printing. Tour.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Acclaimed young-adult writer Woodson (Maizon at Blue Hill) crosses over to adult fiction with this family novel that's brilliant, moving, semi-surreal-and daring, as the author fearlessly loads her palette with words that can offer great color but little sense. Set in Brooklyn mostly during the Vietnam war, the story opens on a nameless black narrator, who's in the fifth grade, and her four siblings, then lets 12 years pass like gray pages of a tabloid. Chapters come in small chunks broken off from the narrator's nerve-tossed heart. Her new baby brother, Cory, is half white (and "the proof that a black man can't leave his woman for one minute without her making a fool out of him," says her annoyed father). Her gay eldest brother, Troy, spends his last night home before going to Vietnam prancing around the kids' bedroom in his mother's high heels. Her third brother, Carlos, has blue eyes whose origin baffles him, and her mother falls into a bad mood and for a week saturates herself with a new Al Green record. Nearly every stage of the narrator's growth is a kind of death, though punctuated by falling in love and by traveling to Coney Island, Cape Cod and the Statue of Liberty. Troy comes home in a casket. Daddy drinks, beats Mama, slips off. Mama gets a bad job with the phone company, then loses her voice forever, while the narrator comes into puberty and ever increasing understanding that this "world can hold a million little girls in its hand. This world can drop them." QPB featured alternate.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Woodson's little novel is a coming-of-age story set in the Vietnam era, when the picture-perfect Brady Bunch set a national standard for the ideal family. Her heroine-narrator, a little African American girl, has another kind of family. She has an older brother who's a drag queen. Her younger, half-white half-brother is an endless reminder to her father of her mother's infidelity. Mother, who presses dolls on the less than enthusiastic narrator, plays Al Green records over and over and slowly waltzes with the broom, encased in her own world, wearing panties on her head when she can't find a scarf. Woodson brings the narrator to her mid-teens, poised on the brink of an awakening, struggling to come to terms with her sexuality, and literally screaming to leave her earlier life behind, "where we're the pitiful ones." This faux memoir, told with painful clarity and fervor, deserves its share of general readers as well as those who home in on women's and African American literature. Whitney Scott
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More About the Author
Jacqueline Woodson's awards include 3 Newbery Honors, a Coretta Scott King Award and 3 Coretta Scott King Honors, 2 National Book Awards, a Margaret A. Edwards Award and an ALAN Award -- both for Lifetime Achievement in YA Literature. She is the author of more than 2 dozen books for children and young adults and lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Thought provoking...,
This review is from: Autobiography of a Family Photo: A Novel (Paperback)
I have to admit, it has been a while since I read this book, but from what I can remember this book brought to light a lot of issues that one confronts growing up and approaching adulthood. The main character is forced to deal with a lot of heavy matters as many young people must do by no choice of their own. Reading this book made me think of the things that we experience as children that we don't stop to consider until years later.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book!,
This review is from: Autobiography of a Family Photo: A Novel (Paperback)
I was fortunate enough to have found this book years ago. It is such a good book! It's very short, but poetic & beautiful. It's the kind of book that you can just read over and over again. I can't tell you how many times I've read it. It does have mature themes, so it's not for Woodson's typical juvenile audience. However it is a great book for the grown up readers out there. I can't recommend it enough! - I guess my only disappointment is that Woodson only writes for kids now, so she doesn't have any other books out there like this one.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Sparse, potent, compelling,
This review is from: Autobiography of a Family Photo: A Novel (Paperback)
With a stark clarity, a little girl tells about her life growing up in the late 1960s and 1970s. They are poor and dark-skinned, except for her baby brother, whose skin tells a different story. Her older brother is lively and loves wearing their mother's heels, but he's shipped off to Vietnam. She chronicles her life and the world around her, about how everyone knows if you don't let someone do it to you, you'll never get married. And about how wanting to kiss your best friend and touch her doesn't mean anything, anything at all in this dark and collapsing world. "Autobiography of a Family Photo" is a spirited, poetic, and dark tale of hope in the strangling grasp of a world without love. It's about that hazy line between courage and obstinacy that few can delineate, and even fewer can balance. This novel is considered one of the 100 Best Gay and Lesbian Novels by the Publishing Triangle.
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