Grand/father, Po’Boy, and Sabe provide a comfortable, respectable home to their only child, Iris, which her teenage pregnancy shatters then uproots. Grand/mother Sabe’s two-year-old mother was left scarred as a child from the fires of Tulsa in 1921, and forced with her family to migrate north eighty years later, Sabe swears she will never return to Oklahoma. The family central to Red at the Bone is three generations deep, and it carries even more generations’ trauma and stories, including the Tulsa race massacre of 1921, the great migration north, teenage pregnancy, and the importance of saving for the future. Set amidst the Brooklyn brownstones (similar to previously reviewed A Woman is No Man), but in Woodson’s family drama novel, the families are African American. Jacqueline Woodson’s Red at the Bone (2019) is gut-punch of a book.
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