Book Review: Red At The Bone
At Babble, we aim to showcase the diverse, international talent that is out there at the moment, from the new to renowned, and provide a platform for artists during a pretty trying time. Nothing encapsulates our ethos quite like a debut - especially one like Red At The Bone by Jacqueline Woodson, a novel which tells the multigenerational stories of an African-American family at the turn of the 21st century.
There’s something very powerful about books which change perspective throughout, whilst telling the same story. There’s a lot to be said for novels, like Milkman by Anna Burns, for instance, where you emerge from the narrative of only one character having experienced the same things as them. It’s like you’ve been allowed access to their minds and become them between book ends. But then there are novels like Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo, or like Red At The Bone, where you have the same intimacy but with an overarching story and you’ve gained insider status by hearing it from all angles. There’s really nothing like feeling immense sympathy and fury for one character, only for it to be flipped on its head when you hear the other side of the story. “My side, your side, and the truth” springs to mind.
The story follows different generations of one African-American family from Brooklyn. At first, a happy, nuclear, middle-class, church-going three: Sabe and Po’Boy, and their daughter Iris. But at 15, this all changes when Iris tells her parents she’s pregnant – and that she’s keeping the baby, welcoming Melody into the mix. Iris’ boyfriend, Aubrey, raised by a single mother with little else but love and food tokens, slips into the paternal role very naturally. Through each character, their pasts, presents and futures, we see their lives unfurl and then intertwine.
This is where multiple perspectives become one of Jacqueline Woodson’s great assets. You never feel – or rather, are never allowed to feel – set in one opinion of a character. Swapping from fury with Iris for leaving Aubrey to raise Melody while she goes to college, to a heart-wrenching empathy for a young girl not equipped to make that sort of decision. From admiration for Aubrey and his sacrifices, to a sense of pitying curiosity as to whether he lacks ambition or whether it was forced upon him by his circumstances. Not to mention the constant awareness of the fact that if the roles were reversed, we would never be as harsh on Aubrey as we are on Iris. It seems that authors are grappling more and more with how a woman’s life does not pivot around motherhood, nor is it the only place from where she can find meaning.
Red At The Bone is like walking a tightrope that you can’t actually fall from, but you have to walk it anyway. By the last page, refreshingly, you are still not inclined to take sides or judge anyone for their choices, but rather just feel a sadness for every character, their struggles, the repercussions of their choices and the choices they were never offered. Red At The Bone is a profoundly simple reminder that life is too complex to make outright judgments, and a call for compassion.
