Jacqueline Woodson's lyrical novel returns to the Brooklyn of her youth through the memories of August, who encounters an old friend and finds herself transported back to the 1970s when four girls—August, Sylvia, Angela, and Gigi—formed a bond they believed would last forever. The narrative moves fluidly between August's present as a successful anthropologist and the summers of her adolescence, when her family arrived in Brooklyn from Tennessee and she found friends who seemed to understand her complicated home life and fierce imagination. Woodson, drawing on her own Brooklyn childhood, recreates the texture of that time and place: the music drifting from windows, the games played on stoops, the adult dangers hovering at the edges of childhood freedom. The girls' friendship provides shelter from their various family troubles—absent fathers, struggling mothers, the racism and sexism they're just beginning to understand as systemic rather than personal. But Brooklyn also harbors predators, and the novel traces how innocence erodes and how each girl chooses her own path forward. Woodson's prose has the compression and rhythm of poetry; she can evoke a entire world in a few precisely chosen details. The novel explores how place shapes identity, how we construct narratives of our past, and how the friends who knew us before we became ourselves retain a unique claim on our understanding.