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Salvage the Bones: A Novel Kindle Edition
Jesmyn Ward, two-time National Book Award winner and author of Sing, Unburied, Sing, delivers a gritty but tender novel about family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.
As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family--motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce--pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBloomsbury USA
- Publication dateAugust 30, 2011
- File size2193 KB
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A gritty but tender story of family and poverty in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.Popular highlight
Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.1,037 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
I will not let him see until none of us have any choices about what can be seen, what can be avoided, what is blind, and what will turn us to stone.1,026 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
The house is a drying animal skeleton, everything inside that was evidence of living salvaged over the years.783 Kindle readers highlighted this
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"This book is impossibly beautiful."—OxfordAmerican.org
"The novel’s power comes from the dread of the approaching storm and a pair of violent climaxes. The first is a dog fight, an appalling spectacle given emotional depth by Skeetah’s love for the pit bull China (their bond is the strongest and most affecting in the book). When the hurricane strikes, Ms. Ward endows it, too, with attributes maternal and savage: ‘Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.’"—Wall Street Journal "From its lyrical yet visceral first scene, this novel had me, and I hardly dared to put it down for fear a spell might be broken. But it never was or will be, such are the gifts of this writer." —Laura Kasischke, author of In a Perfect World "Jesmyn Ward has written… the first Katrina-drenched fiction I'd press upon readers now… Ward's pacing around the hurricane is exquisite—we nearly forget its impending savagery. The Batistes’ shared sacrifice is moving, made more so by their occasional shirking of sacrifice. Ward allows the letdowns integral to family life to play their part."— Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH) "A pitch-perfect account of struggle and community in the rural South… Though the characters in Salvage the Bones face down Hurricane Katrina, the story isn’t really about the storm. It’s about people facing challenges, and how they band together to overcome adversity."— BookPage "Jesmyn Ward has claimed her place both as a contemporary witness of life in the rural South and as a descendent of its great originals… The voice is lyric, unsparing and fierce. You won’t forget this book." —Nicholas Delbanco, author of Lastingness "Ward uses fearless, toughly lyrical language to convey this family’s close-knit tenderness [and] the sheer bloody-minded difficulty of rural African American life... It’s an eye-opening heartbreaker that ends in hope… You owe it to yourself to read this book." —Library Journal (starred review) "Both unflinching and tender, heartbreaking and triumphant. A lyrical and riveting testament to the strength of the human spirit… This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary writer." —Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter "Few works of fiction can capture the heart-wrenching emotions attached to a natural disaster, and fewer still can do it in a way that seems palpable and fresh. Salvage the Bones, the latest by rising star Jesmyn Ward, accomplishes this feat, and then some…. From beginning to end, Jesmyn flirts with perfection in this stunning second novel, and the reader is rewarded for it."— Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, VA) "Salvage the Bones is an engaging novel that, on the surface, seems like a sorrowful tale of a broken household, yet holds beneath it the cherished story of family and loyalty." —TheRoot.com "Deeply felt and bristling with breathtaking imagery, Salvage the Bones will hold its readers utterly riveted to the very last page." —Travis Holland, author of The Archivist’s Story "Salvage the Bones…is uncompromising and frank, showing both beauty and violence, poverty and resilience, in a powerful and poetic voice."— Sun Herald (Biloxi, MS) "[A] poetic second novel … Esch traces in the minutiae of every moment of every scene of her life the thin lines between passion and violence, love and hate, life and death … Her voice… [gives the book’s] cast of small lives a huge resonance."—Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Salvage the Bones is a novel that will make readers wince at times and tear up at others. Ward gives voice to the forgotten families of the Gulf Coast through lyrical imagery and the type of uncensored authenticity that can only be delivered through the eyes of a child… it is a true testament to the realities of rural poverty." — Bust "Jesmyn Ward writes like an angel with a knife to your throat, compelling you with exquisite language and a clear voice to go where she goes, to see what she sees. Salvage the Bones is at turns unsettling and uplifting—raw and honest as a dogfight, lyrical as a poem." —Ken Wells, author of Meely LaBauveAbout the Author
Jesmyn Ward is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing and Salvage the Bones. Her memoir Men We Reaped was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
SALVAGE THE BONES
a novel By JESMYN WARDBloomsbury USA
Copyright © 2011 Jesmyn WardAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60819-522-0
Chapter One
THE FIRST DAY: BIRTH IN A BARE-BULB PLACEChina's turned on herself. If I didn't know, I would think she was trying to eat her paws. I would think that she was crazy. Which she is, in a way. Won't let nobody touch her but Skeet. When she was a big-headed pit bull puppy, she stole all the shoes in the house, all our black tennis shoes Mama bought because they hide dirt and hold up until they're beaten soft. Only Mama's forgotten sandals, thin-heeled and tinted pink with so much red mud seeped into them, looked different. China hid them all under furniture, behind the toilet, stacked them in piles and slept on them. When the dog was old enough to run and trip down the steps on her own, she took the shoes outside, put them in shallow ditches under the house. She'd stand rigid as a pine when we tried to take them away from her. Now China is giving like she once took away, bestowing where she once stole. She is birthing puppies.
What China is doing is nothing like what Mama did when she had my youngest brother, Junior. Mama gave birth in the house she bore all of us in, here in this gap in the woods her father cleared and built on that we now call the Pit. Me, the only girl and the youngest at eight, was of no help, although Daddy said she told him she didn't need any help. Daddy said that Randall and Skeetah and me came fast, that Mama had all of us in her bed, under her own bare burning bulb, so when it was time for Junior, she thought she could do the same. It didn't work that way. Mama squatted, screamed toward the end. Junior came out purple and blue as a hydrangea: Mama's last flower. She touched Junior just like that when Daddy held him over her: lightly with her fingertips, like she was afraid she'd knock the pollen from him, spoil the bloom. She said she didn't want to go to the hospital. Daddy dragged her from the bed to his truck, trailing her blood, and we never saw her again.
What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do. Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet. China's sweating and the boys are gleaming, and I can see Daddy through the window of the shed, his face shining like the flash of a fish under the water when the sun hit. It's quiet. Heavy. Feels like it should be raining, but it isn't. There are no stars, and the bare bulbs of the Pit burn.
"Get out the doorway. You making her nervous." Skeetah is Daddy's copy: dark, short, and lean. His body knotted with ropy muscles. He is the second child, sixteen, but he is the first for China. She only has eyes for him.
"She ain't studying us," Randall says. He is the oldest, seventeen. Taller than Daddy, but just as dark. He has narrow shoulders and eyes that look like they want to jump out of his head. People at school think he's a nerd, but when he's on the basketball court, he moves like a rabbit, all quick grace and long haunches. When Daddy is hunting, I always cheer for the rabbit.
"She need room to breathe." Skeetah's hands slide over her fur, and he leans in to listen to her belly. "She gotta relax."
"Ain't nothing about her relaxed." Randall is standing at the side of the open doorway, holding the sheet that Skeetah has nailed up for a door. For the past week, Skeetah has been sleeping in the shed, waiting for the birth. Every night, I waited until he cut the light off , until I knew he was asleep, and I walked out of the back door to the shed, stood where I am standing now, to check on him. Every time, I found him asleep, his chest to her back. He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh.
"I want to see." Junior is hugging Randall's legs, leaning in to see but without the courage to stick in more than his nose. China usually ignores the rest of us, and Junior usually ignores her. But he is seven, and he is curious. When the boy from Germaine bought his male pit bull to the Pit to mate with China three months ago, Junior squatted on an oil drum above the makeshift kennel, an old disconnected truck bed dug in the earth with chicken wire stretched over it, and watched. When the dogs got stuck, he circled his face with his arms, but still refused to move when I yelled at him to go in the house. He sucked on his arm and played with the dangling skin of his ear, like he does when he watches television, or before he falls to sleep. I asked him once why he does it, and all he would say is that it sounds like water.
Skeetah ignores Junior because he is focused on China like a man focuses on a woman when he feels that she is his, which China is. Randall doesn't say anything but stretches his hand across the door to block Junior from entering.
"No, Junior." I put out my leg to complete the gate barring Junior from the dog, from the yellow string of mucus pooling to a puddle on the floor under China's rear.
"Let him see," Daddy says. "He old enough to know about that." His is a voice in the darkness, orbiting the shed. He has a hammer in one hand, a clutch of nails in another. China hates him. I relax, but Randall doesn't move and neither does Junior. Daddy spins away from us like a comet into the darkness. There is the sound of hammer hitting metal.
"He makes her tense," Skeetah says.
"Maybe you need to help her push," I say. Sometime I think that is what killed Mama. I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born.
"She don't need no help pushing."
And China doesn't. Her sides ripple. She snarls, her mouth a black line. Her eyes are red; the mucus runs pink. Everything about China tenses and there are a million marbles under her skin, and then she seems to be turning herself inside out. At her opening, I see a purplish red bulb. China is blooming.
If one of Daddy's drinking buddies had asked what he's doing to night, he would've told them he's fixing up for the hurricane. It's summer, and when it's summer, there's always a hurricane coming or leaving here. Each pushes its way through the flat Gulf to the twenty-six-mile manmade Mississippi beach, where they knock against the old summer mansions with their slave galleys turned guest houses before running over the bayou, through the pines, to lose wind, drip rain, and die in the north. Most don't even hit us head-on anymore; most turn right to Florida or take a left for Texas, brush past and glance off us like a shirtsleeve. We ain't had one come straight for us in years, time enough to forget how many jugs of water we need to fill, how many cans of sardines and potted meat we should stock, how many tubs of water we need. But on the radio that Daddy keeps playing in his parked truck, I heard them talking about it earlier today. How the forecasters said the tenth tropical depression had just dissipated in the Gulf but another one seems to be forming around Puerto Rico.
So today Daddy woke me up by hitting the wall outside me and Junior's room.
"Wake up! We got work to do."
Junior rolled over in his bed and curled into the wall. I sat up long enough to make Daddy think I was going to get up, and then I lay back down and drifted off . When I woke up two hours later, Daddy's radio was running in his truck. Junior's bed was empty, his blanket on the floor.
"Junior, get the rest of them shine jugs."
"Daddy, ain't none under the house."
Outside the window, Daddy jabbed at the belly of the house with his can of beer. Junior tugged his shorts. Daddy gestured again, and Junior squatted and slithered under the house. The underside of the house didn't scare him like it had always scared me when I was little. Junior disappeared between the cinder blocks holding up the house for afternoons, and would only come out when Skeetah threatened to send China under there after him. I asked Junior one time what he did under there, and all he would say is that he played. I imagined him digging sleeping holes like a dog would, laying on his back in the sandy red dirt and listening to our feet slide and push across floorboards.
Junior had a good arm, and bottles and cans rolled out from under the house like pool balls. They stopped when they hit the rusted-over cow bath Daddy had salvaged from the junkyard where he scraps metal. He'd brought it home for Junior's birthday last year and told him to use it as a swimming pool.
"Shoot," Randall said. He was sitting on a chair under his homemade basketball goal, a rim he'd stolen from the county park and screwed into the trunk of a dead pine tree.
"Ain't nothing hit us in years. They don't come this way no more. When I was little, they was always hitting us." It was Manny. I stood at the edge of the bedroom window, not wanting him to see me. Manny threw a basketball from hand to hand. Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.
"You act like you ancient—you only two years older than me. Like I don't remember how they used to be," Randall said as he caught the rebound and passed it back to Manny. "If anything hit us this summer, it's going to blow down a few branches. News don't know what they talking about." Manny had black curly hair, black eyes, and white teeth, and his skin was the color of fresh-cut wood at the heart of a pine tree. "Every-time somebody in Bois Sauvage get arrested, they always get the story wrong."
"That's journalists. Weatherman's a scientist," Randall said.
"He ain't shit." From where I was, Manny looked like he was blushing, but I knew his face had broken out, tinged him red, and that the rest of it was the scar on his face.
"Oh, one's coming all right." Daddy wiped his hand along the side of his truck.
Manny rolled his eyes and jerked his thumb at Daddy. He shot. Randall caught the ball and held it. "There ain't even a tropical depression yet," Randall said to Daddy, "and you got Junior bowling with shine bottles."
Randall was right. Daddy usually filled a few jugs of water. Canned goods was the only kind of groceries Daddy knew how to make, so we were never short on Vienna sausages and potted meat. We ate Top Ramen every day: soupy, added hot dogs, drained the juice so it was spicy pasta; dry, it tasted like crackers. The last time we'd had a bad storm hit head-on, Mama was alive; after the storm, she'd barbecued all the meat left in the silent freezer so it wouldn't spoil, and Skeetah ate so many hot sausage links he got sick. Randall and I had fought over the last pork chop, and Mama had pulled us apart while Daddy laughed about it, saying: She can hold her own. Told you she was going to be a little scrappy scrawny thing—built just like you.
"This year's different," Daddy said as he sat on the back of his trunk. For a moment he looked not-drunk. "News is right: every week it's a new storm. Ain't never been this bad." Manny shot again, and Randall chased the ball.
"Makes my bones hurt," Daddy said. "I can feel them coming."
I pulled my hair back in a ponytail. It was my one good thing, my odd thing, like a Doberman come out white: corkscrew curls, black, limp when wet but full as fistfuls of frayed rope when dry. Mama used to let me run around with it down, said it was some throwback trait, and since I got it, I might as well enjoy it. But I looked in the mirror and knew the rest of me wasn't so remarkable: wide nose, dark skin, Mama's slim, short frame with all the curves folded in so that I looked square. I changed my shirt and listened to them talking outside. The walls, thin and uninsulated, peeling from each other at the seams, made me feel like Manny could see me before I even stepped outside. Our high school English teacher, Ms. Dedeaux, gives us reading every summer. After my ninth-grade year, we read As I Lay Dying, and I made an A because I answered the hardest question right: Why does the young boy think his mother is a fish? This summer, after tenth grade, we are reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology. The chapter I finished reading day before yesterday is called "Eight Brief Tales of Lovers," and it leads into the story of Jason and the Argonauts. I wondered if Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking. The insects singing as they ring the red dirt yard, the bouncing ball, Daddy's blues coming from his truck radio, they all called me out the door.
China buries her face between her paws with her tail end in the air before the last push for the first puppy. She looks like she wants to flip over into a headstand, and I want to laugh, but I don't. Blood oozes from her, and Skeetah crouches even closer to help her. China yanks her head up, and her eyes snap open along with her teeth. "Careful!" Randall says. Skeetah has startled her. He lays his hands on her and she rises. I went to my daddy's Methodist church one time with my mama, even though she raised us Catholic, and this is what China moves like; like she has caught the ghost, like the holiest voice moves through her instead of Skeetah's. I wonder if her body feels like it is in the grip of one giant hand that wrings her empty.
"I see it!" Junior squeals.
The first puppy is big. It opens her and slides out in a stream of pink slime. Skeetah catches it, places it to the side on a pile of thin, ripped towels he has prepared. He wipes it.
"Orange, like his daddy," Skeetah says. "This one's going to be a killer."
The puppy is almost orange. He is really the color of the red earth after someone has dug in it to plant a field or pull up stones or put in a body. It is Mississippi red. The daddy was that color: he was short and looked like a big red muscle. He had chunks of skin and flesh crusted over to scabby sores from fighting. When he and China had sex, there was blood on their jaws, on her coat, and instead of loving, it looked like they were fighting. China's skin is rippling like wind over water. The second puppy slides halfway out feet-first and hangs there.
"Skeet," Junior squeaks. He has one eye and his nose pressed against Randall's leg, which he is hugging. He seems very dark and very small, and in the night gloom, I cannot see the color of his clothes.
Skeetah grabs the puppy's rear, and his hand covers the entire torso. He pulls. China growls, and the puppy slides clear. He is pink. When Skeetah lays him on the mat and wipes him off , he is white with tiny black spots like watermelon seeds spit across his fur. His tongue protrudes through the tiny slit that is his mouth, and he looks like a flat cartoon dog. He is dead. Skeetah lets go of the towel and the puppy rolls, stiff as a bowling pin, across the padding to rest lightly against the red puppy, which is moving its legs in small fits, like blinks.
"Shit, China." Skeetah breathes. Another puppy is coming. This one slowly slides out headfirst; a lonely, hesitant diver. Big Henry, one of Randall's friends, dives into the water at the river like that every time we go swimming: heavy and carefully, as if he is afraid his big body, with its whorls of muscle and fat, will hurt the water. And every time Big Henry does so, the other boys laugh at him. Manny is always the loudest of them all: his teeth white knives, his face golden red. The puppy lands in the cup of Skeetah's palms. She is a patchwork of white and brown. She is moving, her head bobbing in imitation of her mother's. Skeetah cleans the puppy. He kneels behind China, who growls. Yelps. Splits.
Even though Daddy's truck was parked right beyond the front door and Junior hit me in my calf with a shine bottle, I looked at Manny first. He was holding the ball like an egg, with his fingertips, the way Randall says a good ball handler does. Manny could dribble on rocks. I had seen him in the rocky sand at the corner of the basketball court down at the park, him and Randall, dribbling and defending, dribbling and defending. The rocks made the ball ricochet between their legs like a rubber paddleball, unpredictable and wild, but they were so good they caught to dribble again nearly every time. They'd fall before they'd let the ball escape, dive to be cut by shells and small gray stones. Manny was holding the ball as tenderly as he would a pit puppy with pedigree papers. I wanted him to touch me that way.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SALVAGE THE BONES by JESMYN WARD Copyright © 2011 by Jesmyn Ward. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B005IQ2D9W
- Publisher : Bloomsbury USA; 1st edition (August 30, 2011)
- Publication date : August 30, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 2193 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 273 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 140882700X
- Best Sellers Rank: #79,449 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Jesmyn Ward received her MFA from the University of Michigan and has received the MacArthur Genius Grant, a Stegner Fellowship, a John and Renee Grisham Writers Residency, and the Strauss Living Prize. She is the winner of two National Book Awards for Fiction for Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Salvage the Bones (2011). She is also the author of the novel Where the Line Bleeds and the memoir Men We Reaped, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and the Media for a Just Society Award. She is currently an associate professor of creative writing at Tulane University and lives in Mississippi.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the writing style beautiful, complex, and poetic. They also describe the emotional tone as poignant, important, and realistic. Readers describe the narrative as inviting, transporting, and very realistic. They praise the writing quality as simple yet powerful and well crafted. They describe the content as gripping and powerful. However, some find the pacing slow in the beginning. Opinions are mixed on the emotional intensity, with some finding it gut-wrenching and hard to read without tears, while others find it unpleasant and too much for them to stomach.
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Customers find the writing style beautiful, cleverly told, and not hard to read. They also appreciate the author's interesting way of arranging words to describe things. Readers also mention that the book accurately portrays the living conditions of extreme poverty in the area of Louisiana. They appreciate the book's ability to connect figurative language with colloquial language. Overall, customers find the book timeless in its lush depictions of bayou life.
"...books and really let them take me away, but this book has a special kind of writing and a special story that i never expected to effect me sooo..." Read more
"...I applaud Ward’s lyrical writing style, as well her ability to write such gruesome and honest depictions that made me literally cringe when reading...." Read more
"...Metaphors follow each line of description, and Ward is able to connect figurative language with the colloquial language of characters living in a..." Read more
"...It is a wonderfully described scene and drew me into the novel immediately...." Read more
Customers find the emotional tone of the book poignant, riveting, thrilling, and fascinating. They also appreciate the real, endearing, and idiosyncratic characters. Readers also appreciate that the mythological backdrop to the narrative provides a sense of hope and companionship.
"...take me away, but this book has a special kind of writing and a special story that i never expected to effect me sooo much...." Read more
"...An incredibly moving and poignant novel.The novel opens with its narrator Esch, fourteen years old and pregnant...." Read more
"...It was just way too melodramatic. I won't go into details. This fifteen-year-old would never have described what she supposedly experienced that way...." Read more
"...the novel, in addition to family ties, the novel provides a sense of companionship and a person's human relationship with his dog...." Read more
Customers find the imagery inviting and transporting, evoking a wonderful sense of place. They also say the book is very sad, eye opening, and very realistic.
"...The imagery is completely stunning...." Read more
"...I loved Ward’s use of color, imagery, and myth...." Read more
"...Unlike many novels, this one brings you back to reality and feels very realistic...." Read more
"...in this novel are its best part— they are all so complex but feel very true to life...." Read more
Customers find the writing quality simple yet powerful and well crafted. They also mention the construction is simple yet strong.
"...The book ends strong with the last three chapters moving ahead at full speed as Katrina bears down on Louisiana, not only bringing the horror of..." Read more
"...This kind of timeless quality also adds to the story’s universality. On top of the mythical Greek references, “Salvage” is full of Biblical imagery...." Read more
"...lyrical and savage; poetic and raw; poverty and resilience; uncompromising and confronting; unsettling and uplifting; powerful and real ... and I..." Read more
"...Their resilence is remarkable...." Read more
Customers find the content gripping, powerful, and stunning.
"...I had to skip the pages describing the dogfights, however. It is a gripping, no-holds-barred, brutal story set off by a young man's love and care..." Read more
"...resilience; uncompromising and confronting; unsettling and uplifting; powerful and real ... and I could go on ... all these and more...." Read more
"...felt through the reading was earned by the author, and poignant, and powerful.And purposeful." Read more
"...Sometimes serendipity brings you unexpected depth and power, and that was the case here with storytelling alternately subtle and strong, with lyrical..." Read more
Customers find the plot heartbreaking, but it shows the grit of survivors and the power of survival. They also describe the characters as bold, fearless, and alive.
"...against the storm’s powerful wind and rain begins, they fight courageously for survival...." Read more
"...Characters are bold, earthy, fearless, like those in the Greek myths, living and making love with no thought of..." Read more
"...Throughout the story the strength and resilience of this family is evident and you root for them." Read more
"Gritty, and hard to read at times, but captures the desperation of poverty in the face of natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina)...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the emotional intensity of the book. Some find it gut-wrenching, hard to read without tears, and harsh. Others find it unpleasant, harrowing, and grim. They also say it's self-indulgent and not easy to digest.
"...Both frustrating and annoying, this characterization was, at times, unlikable, yet that is exactly what made Esch so human...." Read more
"...and raw; poverty and resilience; uncompromising and confronting; unsettling and uplifting; powerful and real ... and I could go on ... all these and..." Read more
"...language, and emotional complexity she uses in her writing are not easy to digest...." Read more
"Gut-wrenching and hard to read yet important and poetic. I can taste the salty humidity of the Mississippi Gulf Coast and feel the wrath of Katrina." Read more
Customers find the pacing of the book slow in the beginning. They also mention that the sexual content is unexpected and that it takes forever to get to Katrina.
"The pacing in the first 2/3 is very slow, and Skeetah's obsession with his dog sounds like it's money-motivated only..." Read more
"...I found the book sorely wanting and difficult to read, as the text read rather slowly and the action of the book takes places when the Hurrican..." Read more
"...It definitely picks up quickly and you will become enmeshed with all the main characters, especially, Esch, Skeetah, China and the rest of the..." Read more
"...However, this is unfortunately where most praise ends. The novel is incredibly slow and has very little points...." Read more
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There are plenty of other reviews here that tell you how it's not a "happy" book (why that matters i dont know), so i wont go on about that part. I dont base my reading choices on whether they have a happy fantasy story.
This story is very real. The writing is really good. I have several points that i use to rate a book: the story itself, the actual writing style, the 'entertainment' value, the emotions it brings out - laughter, sadness, etc., and if it's very memorable - either by being very different than anything i've ever read, or by something else about it being very different.
The only point out of all of those that i wouldnt give a 5 would be the writing style/prose - which i'd give a 4. It's very good, but not "amazing" to me like some authors are.
The author brought me into the characters - where i could feel what they were feeling, and i understood why they did the 'bad' things they did - totally. I felt the way they lived, the area, the poverty... As the story progressed, i stayed up one night for HOURS wanting to know what happened - until the sun rose actually.
As the finale was coming - which i had no idea would be the way it was - i was literally gripping the book with both hands and holding it up to my face. I realized this and laughed to myself since i hadnt even noticed. Then - i sobbed thru the last 20 pgs - i havent cried from ANY fiction for a long time. Yes, i get into books and really let them take me away, but this book has a special kind of writing and a special story that i never expected to effect me sooo much.
The author THEN does something so amazing at the very end - when i couldnt believe it could get any better. I KNEW what i wanted to happen - and i kept thinking to myself, "no, it wont - because it will just seem to corny if it does." (Even tho i wanted it so much.) She made it happen in a special way, without making it corny but while bringing me the hope and good feeling i needed after all the sobbing. (I dont want to give anything away just in case you dont know the story.)
This book scores an A+. If you love good, moving, American fiction you will love this.
The novel opens with its narrator Esch, fourteen years old and pregnant. She often follows her brothers around, and is constantly surrounded by men as well as the gruesome society of dog-fighting. Esch’s predominant male surrounding is, perhaps, the main influence that encourages her to sleep with her brother’s friends, and to submissively pine for the one boy, Manny, who unforgivingly mistreats her. Though Esch’s character was impeccably frustrating, and borderline stereotypical and archetypal, her faults lie with a motherless young girl, who wants to be wanted and loved. Both frustrating and annoying, this characterization was, at times, unlikable, yet that is exactly what made Esch so human.
I applaud Ward’s lyrical writing style, as well her ability to write such gruesome and honest depictions that made me literally cringe when reading. Ward is able to effortlessly incorporate poetic language into her novel that, at times, made me set the book in both awe and envy, knowing I would never be able to produce such a product. I did find there to be a disconnect between the poetic language and the colloquial diction. That’s to say, I found it a bit unbelievable that Esch would speak so poorly to her family and friends, yet express herself so eloquently in her narration. Regardless, I found the poetic language to be successful and moving.
I knew before reading the book that it was centered on Hurricane Katrina. However, I was surprised that the novel was centered on the build-up to the hurricane. Katrina itself is more or less twenty pages. The chapter pertaining to the hurricane, as well as the aftermath of the hurricane, were the sections of the novel that I found most captivating. Living through the hurricane with Esch and her family was difficult to read, which is perhaps why Ward chose to limit its description. That said, I wish I had more of Katrina and its aftermath. I waited for the hurricane for 200 pages, and it seemed to end as soon as it started. Though I was unsatisfied by the ending, I appreciated that the novel was a work that was not so much about Katrina as it was about survival and family.
I was captivated by Ward’s poetic writing and honest characters. I will definitely be on the lookout for her other works, as well as an avid recommender of this novel.
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Due stelle e non una perché almeno dopo aver chiesto il cambio sono arrivati in condizioni normali.
Reviewed in Italy on May 23, 2023
Due stelle e non una perché almeno dopo aver chiesto il cambio sono arrivati in condizioni normali.