© 2011 Jesmyn Ward
Best-selling author Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award for this poignant and poetic novel. Unfolding over 12 days, the story follows a poor family living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. With Hurricane Katrina bearing down on them, the Batistes struggle to maintain their community and familial bonds amid the storm and the stark poverty surrounding them.
“Masterful … Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it.”–Washington Post
Salvage the BonesA Novel
Jesmyn Ward
Summary
Salvage the Bones
Narrarated by: Cherise Boothe
eMusic Review 0
02.28.12
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage The Bones
2012 | Label: Recorded Books
Equal parts tenderness and violence that calls to mind Flannery O’Connor
It’s a sad truth that tragedy breeds great literature: War gave us Hemingway, the Great Depression gave us Steinbeck, and in the case of the 2011 National Book Award winner for fiction, Salvage The Bones, Hurricane Katrina gave us Jesmyn Ward. While the book takes place in the days leading up to one of the worst tragedies in American history, the storm looms in the distance, and adds angst to the already powerful story of the 14-year-old narrator named Esch.
What stings the most in Ward’s novel is how it confronts you without actually being at all confrontational. Ward’s words aren’t meant to make readers feel bad that they have it better than the poor and sexually promiscuous underage narrator, but it makes you wonder if we’re truly living in a post-racialAmerica. Esch’s family life is as broken down as the place that they live in, but their suffering isn’t presented as heroic; rather, they’re living down and out in a Southern town that is on the verge of being obliterated, and nobody is ever going to help them out – before the storm, or after.
Ward twists the region’s dialect into something supernaturally beautiful. The story is told with a graceful ease, almost as if this is Esch’s memoir and not a brilliant example of the new Southern Gothic movement that Jesmyn Ward now leads. There’s equal parts tenderness and violence in Salvage The Bones that calls to mind Flannery O’Connor and the Dirty South grit of Faulkner or Jim Thompson. Ward’s book deserves to be mentioned among those masters.
The audiobook is narrated by Cherise Booth, a reader with a firm grasp on the accents and dialect that Ward so beautifully presents on paper. The sound of a brilliant novel is spot on coming out of your speakers.