Jacqueline Woodson is the author of more than 20 books, including the award-winning Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming, for children, teens, and adults. And in 2019, she wrote Red at the Bone, a coming-of-age novel about the connections between two Black families in America.
The Iron Book Discussion Group will read and discuss Red at the Bone in February 2026.
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BOOK DESCRIPTION
Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. Moving forward and backward in time, with the power of poetry and the emotional richness of a narrative ten times its length, Jacqueline Woodson’s extraordinary new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of this child.
As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody’s coming of age ceremony in her grandparents’ Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the soundtrack of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody’s mother, for her own ceremony— a celebration that ultimately never took place.
Unfurling the history of Melody’s parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they’ve paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives—even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.
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Copies of Red at the Bone can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and it’s also available to download through Overdrive/Libby as an audiobook.
An in-person discussion of Red at the Bone will be held at the library on Tuesday, February 10, at 6:00 PM. No registration is required, so please join us if you’d like to be part of the discussion.
Published on January 22, 2026.
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