By Jesmyn Ward
"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."
"Salvage the Bones is an intense book, with
powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor . . . We are immersed in
Esch’s world, a world in which birth and death nestle close, where there is
little safety except that which the siblings create for each other. That
close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn with complexities
and detail." —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
By Jesmyn Ward
"In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her
life—to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who
live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after
another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why? And as she began to write about the
experience of living through all the dying, she realized the truth—and it took
her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were
and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and
economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family
and relationships. Jesmyn says the answer was so obvious she felt stupid for
not seeing it. But it nagged at her until she knew she had to write about her
community, to write their stories and her own."
"An important contemporary
voice: a sensitive, lyrical narrator of difficult stories from the land of
Faulkner and Welty." —The New York Times
"[Ward]
chronicles our American story in language that is raw, beautiful and dangerous…
[Her] singular voice and her full embrace of her anger and sorrow set this work
apart from those that have trodden similar ground… With loving and vivid
recollection, she returns flesh to the bones of statistics and slows her ghosts
to live again… [It’s a] complicated and courageous testimony."—Tayari
Jones, The New York Times Book Review
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