Salvage the Bones
A Novel
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the National Book Award
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
As this National Book Award winner opens, Hurricane Katrina is mere days away, and we see the inevitable chaos through the eyes of a poor Black family living in a small Mississippi bayou town. Teenage Esch quietly reads Greek mythology as she copes with the violent nausea of early pregnancy and the sad knowledge that the baby’s father doesn’t care for her or the coming child in the same way she so powerfully does for him. Her brother Randall focuses on his basketball dreams, her brother Skeetah devotes himself to his fighting pit bull, China, and her new puppies, and their younger brother Junior pokes around in the dirt underneath their crumbling home. Meanwhile, their alcoholic father ineffectually attempts to direct their preparation for the coming storm. Jesmyn Ward endured Katrina herself, and she poetically and viscerally expresses this family’s emotionally complex landscape, even as the physical landscape gears up to roll over them. After experiencing this gorgeously written storm of a book, Katrina will feel personal to you in a way that it may never have before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ward's poetic second novel (after Where the Line Bleeds) covers the 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina via the rich, mournful voice of Esch Batiste, a pregnant 14-year-old black girl living with her three brothers and father in dire poverty on the edge of Bois Sauvage, Miss. Stricken with morning sickness and dogged by hunger, Esch helps her drunken father prepare their home for the gathering storm. She also looks after seven-year-old Junior while her oldest brother, Randall, trains to win a scholarship to basketball camp, and middle son Skeet devotes himself to delivering and raising his fighting bitch China's pit bull puppies. All the while, Esch ponders whether she will have the baby and yearns for its father to love her "once he learns secret." 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, and though her voice threatens to overpower the story, it does a far greater service to the book by giving its cast of small lives a huge resonance.
