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Content snapshot
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Violence
Some
Neighborhood violence and the Vietnam-era fallout sit in the background; the physical harm the novel actually stages is sexual rather than combative
Language
Some
Restrained
Sexual Content
Very heavy
The rape of a twelve-year-old girl by an adult in a laundry room, sexual abuse by a pastor, and a shopkeeper soliciting girls for money
Substance Use
A lot
Heroin addiction is part of the neighborhood's fabric in 1970s Bushwick and takes people the girls know
Emotional Intensity
Maternal mental illness and a mother who never arrives, a death the child refuses to accept, a friend's later suicide, and grief revisited from adulthood
What this book is about
August returns to Brooklyn at twenty-eight to bury her father, and the novel unspools the friendship of four girls beginning in 1973. Kirkus, which called it "a stunning achievement," is direct about the predation: a pastor who presses against Gigi while she sings in the choir, "the ex-soldier in the laundry room who rapes Gigi when she's 12," a bodega owner offering money for sexual favors, and girls "overwhelmed by the casual, commonplace, predatory violence of men." August's mother heard voices from her dead brother and never came with them from Tennessee. Woodson wrote and published this as an adult book despite her YA reputation, and reviewers warn that the sexual content is not appropriate for younger readers.
Notes for sensitive readers
Reader-flagged moments and themes that may affect your experience.
Rape of a twelve-year-old and clerical sexual abuse
Maternal mental illness and unacknowledged death
Heroin addiction in the surrounding community
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