Jesmyn Ward's latest book, Salvage the Bones, didn't get a lot of attention before rising out of the dust with the National Book Award in 2011. It is a beautiful, moving, thrilling story. This all happens seamlessly, almost while you aren't paying attention, because you are compelled by the hurricane and the crescendo pitch that Ward build.
It was as if she took a group of people from the television news of Hurricane Katrina, standing on the bridge or stuck in an evacuation center, and picked the ones that would be most likely to be ignored, disregarded, or used as negative examples, and then proceeds to make you understand them, one by one, and even to start to love some of them.
I think that this is the mark of genius in Jesmyn Ward. In short, I have never encountered a character like the character of Esch so close to who I am and yet so different. I could not put the book down the final third I read standing up as I never actually made it to the chair I intended to sit in. From there, I was drawn completely into the lives of 15-year old Esch and her brothers, family, and neighbors. The first chapter failed to fully grab me, but I persevered.
I picked it up because it won the 2011 National Book Award. When I finished this book, I felt like my life was better for having read it. 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. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting.Īs 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. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets she's fourteen and pregnant. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned.
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