Salvage the Bones is Ward’s first novel, and it’s the only one she’s written that deals specifically with hurricane Katrina, though all her novels take place in Mississippi around the same time. I was lucky enough to borrow the audible of this novel from my library, and let me tell you, driving down the highway at 5 in the morning listening to the audible narrator, Cherise Boothe, describe a pitbull giving birth was an experience. While extremely important to the story, Wards descriptions of afterbirth and squelches definitely made me a bit ill. Ward has written three novels to date, and while I have not yet read the third, the two I have read both begin with blood, and in this vivid tale of abject poverty and woe, it begins with the birthing of puppies. This is the second novel of Ward’s that I’ve read, and I truly to believe her prose is poetic, though some of it might be just a bit too overpowering. Overall, Jesmyn Ward creates extremely vivid, real portrayals of life, her words floating off the page, creating mostly beautiful imagery as her stories unfold, though truth be told, some of this imagery I could do without. A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real. As the twelve days that comprise the novel’s framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel’s heart-motherless children sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to struggle for another day. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull’s new litter, dying one by one in the dirt, while brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child’s play and short on parenting. 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. From Goodreads: A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch’s father is growing concerned.

Jesmyn ward salvage the bones review