Salvage the Bones

Multi Awards winner! Fictional family during the week leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Takes place in Mississippi Great literary read. I need a book like this ever so often (Too Many Cozy Mysteries)!
260 Pages, National Book Award for Fiction 2011! Read it, the book is worth the time - David N.

Ward is clearly a deft writer, and despite the generally straightforward tale, the author has managed to weave emotional twists and still occasionally subvert the reader's expectations. This story isn't really about hurricane Katrina, but the storm in these pages is still disruptive, forcing readers to reflect on class, race, and the incensed heart of a mother.

This book was hard to read, but absolutely riveting in parts. It really isn't a happy book, and the descriptions are brutal and blunt. But it is a compelling story, and although slow in paces, the characters and narrative drew me in.

Difficult reading, and I mean that along many dimensions. The story itself is painful, a train wreck from first to last page: feral children, poor decision-making skills, compounded by terrible luck, tied together by a fierce protective love... all they have is each other. There is suffering and cruelty, also compassion and tenderness, and it isn't always obvious which is which.

Difficult—and I dislike myself for saying this—stylistically too. The writing has a choppiness to it that didn't work for me, similar to the way Cormac McCarthy's writing grates on me. The fault is entirely mine but it saddens me: I had been hoping to enjoy this book much more, but am not the kind of person who can.

Difficult, finally, because the story is so real; because I feel so powerless against this kind of suffering.

I think this is just the kind of thing where I can appreciate abstractly the quality of writing while acknowledging that it's not really my cup of tea.

Beautifully written, heartbreaking in places. I wanted to devour it but it was too much sometimes.

That was seriously amazing. This book sneaks up on you. In the beginning I found it a little boring and didn't empathise with the characters at all. But then it picked up the pace alongside the upcoming Katrina, and I was mesmerised and hooked by it, so much so that I genuinely cried at the ending. It was very cathartic and heartbreaking, but nevertheless I didn't find it overly depressing or dark. There were really disgusting scenes that were written so vividly I wanted to put the book down, but once I got into it, it stopped bothering me that much.

It has very diverse and complex characters and amazing language on top of all that. Definitely a favourite.

The plot is actually pretty slight–a motherless family with a variety of challenges (girl with boy problems, boy raising fighting pit bull with puppies, boy trying to win a scholarship to basketball camp, etc.) hunkers down in advance of the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, which then arrives. The hurricane scene is brilliant–I would have happily read more of that.

There are also echoes–made quite evident because the girl is reading mythology–of Medea's story. But it isn't really clear to me what the point of that might be. Is the girl planning to kill her child in revenge for the boy's betrayal?

This is the best book I've read in a long, long time. Ward's prose is gorgeous - poetic, sharp, and flowing. The audiobook narrator does an excellent job bringing each character to life. The story is not an easy one - four motherless children, neglected by their alcoholic father, living in deep poverty in rural Louisiana - but oh, this one is richly deserving of its National Book Award.

I was expecting the ending to be more climatic, after the slow pressure build-up to the storm. Instead, I felt vaguely unsatisfied at the end, and felt the prose itself was somewhat over-the-top. Nothing about the book really lingers with me.

It is a completely new world to me. Rural, poor and black in the days leading up to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. I could listen to Jesmyn Ward write about the weather all day. I feel the throat-closing heat like a wet blue blanket and hear the sounds of the summer insects.

This is one of the most painfully difficult books I have ever read. It's about 15 year old Esch Batiste and her family who live in coastal Mississippi. Although Hurricane Katrina happens in the book, it's not a focal point of the story except that the reader knows Katrina is coming, and that it will be much worse than the characters are aware.

I think that overarching dread is one difficult aspect of this book. I knew the whole time what was coming, and the characters did not. Daddy Batiste is an alcoholic, and pays little attention to his children. He does, however, prepare almost obsessively for a hurricane, mostly so he has something to do all day because he's not working most of the time.

Esch has 3 brothers: Randall, Skeetah, and Junior. Randall aspires to play basketball, Skeetah dotes over his pitbull China constantly, and Junior just gets in the way. Esch is barely pregnant in the book, and she's in love with the baby's father who doesn't even see her as a person. Skeetah treats his dog with more love than the father of her baby treats Esch.

There is a whole lot of social commentary in this book. The pitbull fighting is hard to read about, it's animal abuse, and it's prevalent in some parts of society. Skeetah loves China almost like he'd love a daughter or a girlfriend, yet has no problems fighting her with other pitbulls. It's nearly impossible for me to relate to that.

The Batiste's mother Rose died after giving birth to Junior, after giving birth to him in their family house that Esch's grandparents built, and not because she's some new age mother who wants to have a home birth with a midwife but because they clearly couldn't afford a hospital. They hear about the oncoming hurricane on their radio, while the TV gets little to no reception. There is no computer, no internet, no books, no newspapers.

Reading this book has given me extra perspective on both the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the existence of real poverty here in America. To believe that families such as the fictional Batistes ever had any chance of getting out before the hurricane hits is ridiculous.

I read a blog post by a prominent white American author recently who explains that being a white male in America is having the easiest mode in the RPG of life. This book is one way to help see why this is the case. Esch, who loves the Greek story of Medea and who exhibits what could almost be seen as a love of literature, really has no chance. Being 15 and pregnant, with an alcoholic neglectful father, an abusive father of her baby, and nothing to eat except Ramen noodles has to climb a ladder higher than I know I would be able to in order to achieve what I have.

This is a great and painful book. It has left me depressed but grateful, and I'm glad I could get through it. I perhaps made it more social commentary than other readers might, but those are the messages I heard loudest while reading the book.

A world I have never read about before. I was glad to know this family. Not an easy, breezy read....lots of meat on these bones.