Salvage the Bones: A Novel

Although the author goes overboard with figurative language, there are some wonderful passages. Lousy plot. Like reading a trashy talk show. A few bright spots in terms of development, but not many. You wouldn't be missing out if you passed this one up.

Gritty, and hard to read at times, but captures the desperation of poverty in the face of natural disasters (Hurricane Katrina). I found myself rooting for the characters, especially Esch and her brothers. The authors profuse use of similes was a little annoying at times, but the story holds your interest and is compelling and believable.

This is a great author. It's no wonder this book one a national award. The book is extremely well written. The subject matter is pretty rough but still a great story. I gave this book only three stars because it just wasn't my favorite book. It's a great one, but I doubt I really would have read it or recommend it to others had it not one The National Book Award. Still very good, but won't be in my Top 10.

Salvage the Bones is truly well written. The pacing picks up as the hurricane bears down. I had to skip over all the passages that dealt with dog fighting and that surely is a large portion of this slim novel, so for that reason I am disappointed.

The language was fabulous, I really liked it. It really reflects the society of black people and how cruel the world is. I started reading The bug because is my summer homework, but her writing skills are truly astonishing and powerful.

This book was about a poor family who unfortunately had to suffer through a natural disaster. The only two characters that were somewhat interesting was the girl, Esch and the dog owner, Skeetah. They were interesting only because the author seemed to put more effort into developing them than the other characters in the book. The constant references to greek mythology were unnecessary and random, it made no sense especially if you were not familiar with the particular greek story. This book was very slow and very boring; and, it seemed like the author went off on tangents about irrelevant pieces of information. I made myself finish it because I was hoping it would get interesting, and it did aruond page 250 when the hurricane came down, but the whole description of the events of the hurricane seemed rushed. I did not like the ending. In fact, the only thing that stuck with me in this book was Esch because she reminded me of plenty teengage girls looking for love. I would not recommend it because it was not a page turner nor engaging in any sense. I finished it simply out of obligation because I did not want to waste my money. Get it from the library.

Had difficulty reading about the circumstances and conditions of the family, especially dog fighting. Reasonably well written. Provokes thought. Brings the world as we don't usually see it into focus,

I had high hopes for this book, but was quickly disappointed. I felt like the author was more concerned about showing off her fancy prose footwork than telling a good story. And the metaphors were not that effective, but rather cIunky and obvious. I tried to finish it, but just could not. I liked the main character though and enjoyed being allowed inside her mind.

As a Mississipian I looked forward to reading this book. The opening portion was sufficiently interesting as it described the life of the main characters. The problem I encountered is the subject matter and profane language that ramped up later in the book. It was just too much for me to stomach and I stopped reading due to losing connection to the plot.

This sounded like a good read but did not turn out to be one for me. Things just felt so mundane the more I read and I thought "were is this going" and "do I want to go with it?" The answer was no. Has happened before and will happen again. I guess I'm just more into mystery/thrillers with a few exceptions along the way.

Lots of adjectives and a fairly long story made even longer by all the lengthy descriptions of every little thing. Slow start for me but it picked up some and since the hurricane happened in my lifetime, I thought it was an ok book.

Sorry but I have no idea how this book won any awards. I found it to be hard to follow, what should have been a touching emotional story was just so dry and bland, really not at all well written. I wouldnt recommend this one which is a shame because the story had such promise but lacked any depth or emotional connection to draw me in.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward begins 10 days before Hurricane Katrina hits the family's town Bois Sauvage, Mississippi and is mostly narrated by Esch a fourteen year old girl. Esch has three younger siblings, Skeeter, Randall and Junior. The children's mother died in childbirth with Junior. The children's dad is an alcoholic, which forces the children to take care of themselves, since there isn't any other family around to help rear them. There are twelve chapters in the book, which represents the 10 days leading up to the storm, the day of the storm and the day after. The 2 subplots includes Esch finding out that she's pregnant and how she deals with her situation the majority of the story and also about Skeeter, his prize winning pit bull China.

For me there were three major issues with this book. The book presentation, storyline and characters, which are basically most of the major components for any book.

1.) The book cover makes you feel like you're about to read a children's book and not necessarily a women's fiction book, which is the genre that the book is listed under. The synopsis nor the story really supports the title of the book. My entire book club had to really try to connect the title to the book. Because the book was really about a family preparing for the hurricane and the dog was really a subplot I had a problem understanding why the book was called Salvage the Bones or the relevance of the title to the entire story outside of the Skeeter trying to save China and her pups from Parvo disease and the storm, which wasn't the main plot. With all of this to consider the title and cover didn't quite make sense based on the synopsis and content of the book.

2.) The second issue with the book was the storyline itself. The book is told over twelve days altogether, which I think is a challenge within itself because it's such a short amount of time to make everything make sense and the story believable. Also, the story was mostly about the children in the family and I really wondered with the book cover and the fact that the story is based on the kids if the book was really in the correct genre altogether. Maybe this particular book would be better serviced in Young Adult Fiction instead of Women Fiction minus some of the profanity and the dog fight scene. From chapter to chapter not much changed with the family at all. The storyline lacked depth, which made it very difficult for me to want to read further into the book. I also felt that I didn't really get an ending to the story. As we all know, there's definitely a story to be told when it comes to natural disaster survivors so I was puzzled when the book ended on the twelfth day and didn't really let us know if or how the family got back on their feet and the struggles that they went through to get there or if they didn't at all. So I was left unsatisfied because there weren't really anything known about what happened to the family other than they survived. I think the story would have had some redeeming qualities had Ms. Ward focused on giving us more background about the family and then maybe a few days prior to the storm and moved us forward with how the family rebuilt their lives. For these reasons the storyline itself were forgettable.

3.) The third issue with the book was the character development. Ms. Ward didn't provide enough information about the characters to make us feel any sort of way about them. It was extremely hard to connect with any of the characters and made the book itself even more of a challenge to continue to read. I really didn't feel any sort of way about the characters and felt that the author fell flat with describing the characters in the book. I really wanted to feel something for one of the characters, even the dog at some point but the lack of character development made it too challenging.

The only redeeming quality for this book is that there were no grammatical errors and the book was priced accordingly. I cannot in good faith recommend this book to anyone.

Based on the KC Girlfriends Book Club Book Review Standards I give this book a 2 star rating.
Our book reviews are based on five components:
1. Book Presentation
2. The Price Point
3. Storyline
4. Character Development
5. Editing

We read this book for our book group. I thought it would be outstanding because it was a National Book Award winner. I was unable to connect these characters to anything in my life, so I wasn't able to get really involved with them. It took too long for the story of the hurricane and its aftermath to unfold. I was extremely unhappy with the dog fighting! Overall, I have given this book a C.

Like a movie that takes time to establish it's foundation, Salvage the Bones was this way for me. I struggled early on to grasp the meaning of the author's emphasis on the family's dog, China. I'm not quite sure I ever really got it; but ultimately, the family's commitment and care of us other showed through, as they weathered the storm (Hurricane Katrina) together. The author does leave you wondering what becomes of the family, the unborn child, China, etc.

This was a very difficult book to read. I hated the dog fighting! It took forever to get to Katrina. It was depressing and sad. I could not figure out what Medea the myth had to do with Esche the main character. I do not understand why it won awards?

If you like books that are over-descriptive, you'll love this book. I didn't care for it at all. The tipping point came when the kids brought in a trash can to their father's room because he was going to throw up. The author tells us of all of the contents that are IN the trash can! Why do I need to know this?! Besides that, the story is very uninteresting: kids with their dad at their house, and one of the kids owns a dog. That's the story!

I did not enjoy reading this book for my book club. We chose it based on the blurb which raved about it. I did not like the characters, and good character development is why I enjoy a book These WERE well-developed, just horribly unsympathtic. However, having said all that, when we met to discuss the book, the leader of that group had done some research on the culture of poverty. Well, guess what. Ward had done an exceptionally good job of portraying it to a T. At my age and with my resources, perhaps it's not necessary for me to again be reminded that there are places in the U. S. that harbor large cultures of poverty. Had I known this was the real theme of the book, I would not have subjected myself to the agony I endured while reading it. I'm ashamed to say that I was rooting for Katrina.

Salvage the Bones
In the opening of the book, readers are introduced to a poor, motherless family from the Mississippi Coast. The father is preparing the house for a hurricane that the news people said is coming. Skeetah, the middle son, is constantly dealing with his pregnant pitbull, China. Esch discovers that she is pregnant by Manny, the eldest brother Randall's, friend. While Randall is driving the tractor for his father to help prepare the house for hurricane Katrina, his father loses three fingers, and the youngest child, Junior, finds them later on. When hurricane Katrina hits the whole family ends up in the attic due to rising water levels. When they realize they're still not high enough, they are forced to break through their roof top and get to their deceased grandparents abandoned home by climbing through a tree. In the process, Skeetah has to let go of China in order to save his pregnant sister, Esch.
Jesmyn Ward, the author or Salvage the Bones uses very vivid detail in her work. The way she writes lets the reader's brain imagine these scenes as they are happening in the book. For example, when Ward is describing the pit, where they call home, she uses such descriptive language it is as if she is causing the brain to paint its own picture. She describes the house on page seven by saying," The walls, thin and uninsulated, peeling from each other at the seams, made me feel like Manny could see me before I even stepped outside." This is a great visual representation of the physical condition of the house while also letting you see how Esch feels while standing in this area of the house.
While Ward was writing Salvage the Bones she did a very good job of making it extremely easy to comprehend. Because she chose to write the book through the eyes of a fifteen year old girl, the words in this book are very easy for almost any reading level to be able to comprehend. This is a great thing for people that do not really like to read because it is not a struggle to try to force your way through the book, the words flow together very nicely. Another great thing about this book is that the chapters cover an entire day. It allows the reader to better be able to follow the story line because the reader knows that each chapter is a separate day in itself. I do like the way the story builds as the days go by. The beginning chapters are more just their everyday routine and what their normal life would be and as hurricane Katrina gets closer and closer to their home, the story begins to build and more detail and interest is put into the story.
The main thing in Salvage the Bones that I do not like is the vulgar language and amount of sex that is involved in this book. The vulgar language used in this book is completely inappropriate. Wade could have gotten her point across in this book without using so many cuss words. I believe the amount of cuss words in this book actually take away from the meaning that she is trying to convey in the book. If Ward had used a more conservative choice of words while writing this book then her message could have been conveyed to a broader spectrum of people. Younger students would be able to read this book rather than just older students. Also, the amount of sex that is so graphically described through the book is too much. Ward could have also written this book without using such extensive detail during the sex scenes.
Ward did not have to use such vulgar details to describe this situation. These situations that are described in this way take away from the meaning of the book.

A heartbreakingly visceral story about a poor black family in rural Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. This whole novel feels like one long in-drawn breath, as things keep getting worse for the main character and her family while you, the reader, know just how devastating the storm is going to be when it finally arrives. There’s a lot to be said for historical fiction that’s presented this way; there’s no real foreshadowing in the text itself, because the protagonist's story is all told in the present tense, but you still can’t help but feel the power of the hurricane looming over the book. A lot of this is due to Ward’s prose, which is simply beautiful. I don’t know if I would ever want to read this book again, but I’m so glad that I read it now and I know it will stick with me for quite some time.

I was very disappointed by this title. From the description I expected a family story from an area of the country I have little experience with. After reading about 50 pages I deleted it from my Kindle. The author is obsessed with sex and the story is lost because of this. The characters are not realistic, Dad is one dimensional"drunk". Skeeter is one dimensional "dog crazy" girl is one dimensional sex crazed. Don' bother reading this.

This book takes place over the course of twelve days and in those twelve days a lot happens. A dog, China, becomes a Mother in a very detailed birthing sequence, a young teen, Esch, learns she is going to be a Mother, and Motherless children prepare for a Hurricane in between attending dog fights, fighting among themselves and caring for their drunk father.

Esch and her brothers live in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Their Mother passed away after giving birth and they are left in the care of their father who is mainly absent from their lives. The children are left to their own devices and raise each other. Esch is fourteen years old and has just discovered that she is pregnant. She has a huge crush on the father but the harsh realities of life are that not everyone you love....loves you back. Skeetah is attempting to save China's puppies after they are born. He loves his dog - China is his pride and joy. She is a pit bull known in the dog fighting circuit. There are some dog fighting scenes which may be disturbing to some readers. Randall is a basketball player who dreams of going pro one day. Junior is the youngest and is basically looked after by his older siblings.

Teen pregnancy, puppies being born, dog fighting, a drunk father, poverty and a hurricane make for a raw and gritty book. This family has it rough but they come together and support each other. Even their father is able to pull himself together enough to try and prepare for Hurricane Katrina.

The beauty in this book is in the beautiful writing, that and the love of a boy for his dog. This book is depressing and sad but also full of familial love. The descriptions are vivid and detailed.

Writing: 5 Plot: 4 Characters: 4

Salvage the Bones is an utterly gripping depiction of life in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi for the Batiste family during the twelve days before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina — as seen through the eyes of 15-year-old Esch.

This family puts the “hard” in hardscrabble — a mother dead from childbirth 8 years prior, a hard-drinking father who shambles about trying to take care of his family, and four children each following their own path to survival. 17-year-old Randall aims for the one basketball camp spot that may get him scout-spotted; 16-year-old Skeetah applies hyper focus to China, his prize pitbull, and her new litter, hoping for cash sales; Esch has sex with any boy who asks — it’s all she feels she has to offer; and 8-year-old Junior simply doesn’t want to be left behind. When Esch finds herself pregnant, she looks to China, Greek mythological figures such as Medea, and even the hurricane itself for insight into what it means to be a mother in her world.

Ward is the master of setting the scene — both external and internal — through small details. She manages to portray raw emotions through the tiniest gesture, or even absence of look or touch without ever resorting to over dramatization. It was a difficult book for me to read as I read casual violence, low expectations, poverty, and children being raised by circumstance rather than design — but speaking through Esch, she doesn’t focus on any of that. From Esch’s perspective, this is what life is, and she is optimistic about her survival, her family, and her community. Although Esch is as the center of the story as the first person narrator, the book is filled with wonderfully portrayed men — each focussed on their own story, some flawed, but most are good men trying to do right in the world in which they find themselves.

In truth I enjoyed Sing, Unburied Sing more — perhaps because I read it first, or perhaps because I read this equally powerful novel a little too soon afterwards. I found it disturbing to read and yet found that I couldn’t put it down. I read it within a 24 hour period.

3.5★
“. . . he wanted the other me. The pulpy ripe heart. The sticky heart the boys saw through my boyish frame, my dark skin, my plain face. . . . I’d let boys have it because for a moment, I was Psyche or Eurydice or Daphne. I was beloved.”

Home is on land they call the Pit outside the fictional Mississippi coastal town of Bois Sauvage. Esch’s family is poor, rough, and dirty.

She loves mythology and escapes by reading and imagining. She tells us her first time having sex was when she was twelve. She’s now about 16, and there is a collection of older boys who wander in and out of the story, a couple of whom slept with her in the beginning but whom she’s now rejected in favour of the one she has a crush on, Manny. He’s tossing a basketball outside with her brother.

“I wondered if Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking. The insects singing as they ring the red dirt yard, the bouncing ball, Daddy’s blues coming from his truck radio, they all called me out the door.”

Manny is a cad of the first order – we don’t like him. He lives with his girlfriend, but Esch is always handy for a secret quickie. She is determined to get him to kiss her and show some affection.

I kept being reminded of a cartoon I saw once, where one girl says to another, “Your boyfriend takes advantage of you. Why do you put up with it?” The other replies “At least he chooses me to take advantage of.”

Esch values herself not at all. She tells us about her brothers, her father, her late mother, her grandparents. We see her only through her telling.

Her mother died having her little brother, and her father doesn’t really know what to do with her. She’s closest to Skeetah, the older brother who is totally devoted to his vicious (except to him) fighting bitch, China, and later to her puppies. People and clothes are filthy, sweaty, smelly. Unpleasant, yes, but real and true.

Esch kept wandering back down sidetracks to tell us about memories or fill us in on background, and I got impatient. It was her escape, no doubt, but I was worrying along with her father about the hurricane warnings!

I also found myself beginning to skim long sections where the boys are playing basketball or the dogs are fighting, and I mean FIGHTING.

The best part was the hurricane – both horrific and terrific. That was absolutely compelling and page-turning. There’s no doubt Ward can write and will continue to win awards.

I particularly enjoyed a section after the story finished which included an interview with her from NPR's All Things Considered (November 17, 2011) about her own experience with Hurricane Katrina after having been told so many times about her parents’ experience with Hurricane Camille in 1969.

“For my parents, the storm was called Camille, and on August 17, 1969, it made landfall.
. . .
The wind sounded like a train , my mother said every time she told me the story, and even though the metaphor made sense, I couldn’t hear it.
. . .
My storm was Katrina.
. . .
The sky turned orange and the wind sounded like fighter jets. So that’s what my mother meant: I understood then how that hurricane, like Camille, had unmade the world, tree by water by house by person. Even in language, it reduced us to improbable metaphor.”

No wonder she writes a good (bad) storm. Terrifying. I enjoyed her recent novel more, "Sing, Unburied, Sing", which I also reviewed.

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the review copy from which I’ve quoted (so something may have changed).

Obviously a book that had been used for school. Writing all over the first half of the pages, some doodling on the cover and inside. I read the book and loved it three or four years ago but lost my copy. Too lazy to send back. Just need to ignore this vendor or buy new.

A bleak, brutal and heartbreaking story of struggle and survival set against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina. this book was far from an easy read, yet I found myself reluctant to put it down, Esch lives with her father and brothers and helps to care for them following the death of her mother several years ago. Times are hard and money is scarce but the family still manages to to struggle on , and when they learn a storm is coming they begin to prepare as they have done so many times before, but this time Esch is hiding a secret, and none of them are ready for the destruction that is headed their way.
I really empathized with this family and their struggles, particularly Esch who just wants the boy she loves to look at her, and just once really see her, and her brother Skeetah who pours all his love and pins all his hopes on China, his fighting pitbull , and her litter of puppies. Despite the bleakness described in the book, the characters have so much heart that it is hard not to feel for them . As the hurricane draws near, and the tension mounts , their fear is almost palpable .
An exceptional and emotional book, and one that I would recommend highly .

"Salvage the Bones" made me view the world from a completely different perspective, and isn't that one of the basic reasons for reading?

At 15, Esch is trying to support her brothers and deal with the beginnings of an unwanted pregnancy, while living in extreme rural poverty on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with Hurricane Katrina bearing down. "Salvage the Bones" is the story of twelve days surrounding Katrina for one small family. It's the story of the rigid restrictions of rural poverty, and the small dreams of somehow escaping from an impossible reality.

Esch's brother Randall is putting all his energy into basketball, hoping against hope that someone will see him play in school contests and offer him a scholarship to a regional training camp, and possibly a way out, to college. Her brother Skeetah sinks all his attention and energy into his fighting pit bull, China, and her brand-new litter of puppies. China is well known in fighting circles regionally, and her pups should sell for high dollars. The youngest brother, Junior, whose birthing killed the family's mother, has been raised by Esch and her brothers and their often-drunken father.

Amid all this, there are moments of wonder, the bonds of family, the strength of community.

"Salvage the Bones" opened my eyes. It made me uncomfortable. It challenged my worldview. And the icing on the cake is that Ward's writing voice is unique and lovely, easy to sink into and savor.

One caveat: The book involves an eyes-wide-open, unsentimental, account of a dog fight. I personally loathe dog fighting, and it was tough to read. But I'm glad I did, because it helped me understand more of the situations and psychological urges that lead to dog fighting. I still loathe it, but now I hate it less blindly.

"Salvage the Bones" is set in rural Mississippi, the summer of 2005. The whole novel leads up to the explosion of Hurricane Katrina, but it focuses on two parallel story lines: Esch and China. Fourteen year-old Esch has been the woman of the house, caring for her alcoholic father and brood of brothers, since her mother's death years before. She is also pregnant. Esch dreams constantly of the baby's father, an older boy as gorgeous as he is unattainable. I felt that Ward captures what it feels like to be a teenage girl, and in love, quite convincingly. Sensitive yet matter-of-fact, intelligent yet foolish and impulsive like any teenager, Esch seems like a real girl to me. I would love to read a sequel about her. Most of the other characters were quite likable and convincing as well.

China is the snow-white pit bull whom Esch's brother Skeetah treats as lovingly as his own child (even as he trains her to be a fierce fighting dog). China herself has just had puppies, and the novel explicitly links the fates of Esch and China, which I suppose says a lot about what it feels like to be a poor black girl in the South. This book reminded me of both "The Color Purple" (published in 1982) and "Their Eyes Were Watching God" (published in 1937, and definitely my favorite of the three), and I found it kind of sad that Esch's life shared so many similarities with those of Celie and Janie. She struggles with both the same kind of relentless poverty and the same abuses on account of her gender.

One false note I felt the author struck was in endlessly alluding back to the myth of Medea and Jason, which has the effect of jarring the reader out of the story. As a teenage girl you are experiencing everything for the first time, things that (in your mind) no one has ever experienced before, and trying to tie Esch back into ancient Greek myth feels somehow false. This story and its characters are rich enough on their own.

This is absorbing. Ward writes about a rural Mississippi family’s life leading up to Katrina’s arrival in 2005. But Katrina is not really the major event of the story — in fact, most of the book is the story of their lives before Katrina hits.

Esch, a teenaged young woman, tells the story. She and her brothers, Skeetah, Randall, and Junior, live with their father in deep southern Mississippi. Their lives are pretty much make-do. Skeetah’s dog China is everything to him — he loves her like people love their dogs, but she’s also his fighting dog, a meal ticket. Randall is a basketball prospect, by Esch’s description someone who comes alive and only becomes himself with a basketball in his hands. Junior is just starting out, born well after his brothers and sister, and destined to follow hard footsteps. Esch’s father is on the edge of broken, his wife having died in Junior’s childbirth and life just a hard crawl every day.

The turns of Esch’s life take on significance through her reading and seeing herself through the mirror of the story of Medea and Jason (she is reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology). There’s a justice in her seeing herself through that mirror of Greek myth — the heroes (and anti-heroes) of mythology are great not so much because they are heroes but because they are human, staking out the timeless themes and tensions of human lives. And Esch elevates her own life through the lens of Medea and Jason.

Ward has the rare ability to make you feel as if you are actually inside the story. When Katrina hit, I felt the rain and wind. I felt the oppressive confines of Esch’s, Skeetah’s, Junior’s, Randall’s, and their father’s lives. I felt the gleam of light that Randall got from basketball, Skeetah from China, and Esch from her romantic daydreams.

Seeing characters from the inside this way makes them sympathetic no matter their faults, and there are plenty to go around here. It works in real life, too. This is how you get past appearances.

If we are going to understand Katrina, and, if we are going to understand anything about what it is to be poor, rural, and black in southern Mississippi, we need writers like Ward. This is the kind of stuff that makes you bigger.

"Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward is a slow malting novel that takes time to mature, but come the end, all the characterisation and scene building fuses together in 1 perfect explosion.

I don't tend to read literary fiction but something about this book screamed to be read. The detail and portrayal of each and every character was exquisite. I felt like I knew them all inside and out. The setting was also wonderfully described. I could feel the sizzling heat on my skin and the warm humid air before a storms hits. It was simply a beautifully, heartbreaking read.

"Salvage the Bones" is about a family preparing for a storm to hit but really it is not about the storm at all. It is about each and every one of their sacrifices and struggles, qualities and flaws but above all their love and loyalty to one another. I didn't realise how much the characters had touched my heart until I was sobbing like a baby at the end. (This could be down to having a heart procedure and being full of sedation and adrenaline but I know I would of cried like a baby no matter the day or circumstances.)

So why 3 stars? As others have stated there are quite a few disturbing scenes of dog abuse, dog fighting and dog neglect. It did add substance to the story but being the biggest dog lover it was extremely difficult to stomach. Also as much as the story was about the characters rather than a plot itself, it could of had just a little more drama and excitement. It was extremely slow to build up and finally feel the way I felt for the characters.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

It was hard to get into. The story was slow building up. Once it got to the climax (when the hurricane hit) it was not what I was expecting. I was left wanting more of the story. I did not like the end. It felt incomplete.

This is just my own personal opinion. Please feel free to disagree and please read the other reviews.

Heavy, Lyrical and Gripping.
I have started and stopped this review several times because my own words just can't do justice to Ms. Ward's beautiful words. This is the kind of book that once you finish, you just turn back to the first page and read it again.
So often, the books that read like poetry will lack the suspense or the pull to make it a page-turner. Yet Salvage the Bones manages to keep the reader afloat instead of drowning in prose. It is a gorgeous story wrought with rawness, tenderness and downright ugliness. You will cry at at least one of these things, as they all cause your heart to rip open.
Such a good book.

Ward weaves the Medea myth into the events before and after Hurricane Katrina to tell the story to the Batiste family, a dirt poor black family living in the Bayou of Mississippi. Told by Esch, the 14 year old daughter, sister to Randall and Skeetah, both older than her, and Junior, 7 years old, we follow their meanderings in the 12 days up to and including the devastation of Katrina. They are parentless children, with a dead mother and a drunken father who does little to supervise or nurture his children, yet they evolve remarkably as responsible, intelligent, loyal members of this family. The relationship between Skeetah and China, his pit bull fighting dog, and Randall and Jr, Esch and Manny, are fascinating and memorable.
This book made me a part of their lives, being incredibly poor in the deep south and looked down upon, each with their shattered dreams, but part of a beautiful community of friends, like Big Henry and his mother. I felt their pain, their suffering, and it made me cry.
This is a beautifully written book, filled with evocative metaphors, that I recommend to anyone who loves to be drawn into a different world and become emotionally involved in the characters lives.

Fourteen-year-old Esch, who has just found out that she's pregnant, is simply trying to keep things at home together when she and her family learn of the hurricane that is about to hit their home in Bois Savage, Mississippi. Esch's father, a man who spends most of his time drinking, is concerned about the hurricane and tries to get she and her three brothers to board up windows and get the canned goods together in preparation. Her brother Randall begins this process, her brother Junior tries but is too young to do much, but her brother Skeetah is too busy nursing his pit bull fighter, China, back to health after the birth of her puppies. As this family struggles to pull themselves together, the hurricane becomes the backdrop for all the trials they regularly face in day-to-day life.

Salvage the Bones is unlike any novel I've read before. It is so honest, so raw, and at times so painful that I wanted to close the book and run away, but ultimately I was deeply moved by this story. Esch and her family crawled into my heart and their struggles were so palpable that I wanted to reach through the pages of the book and lift them out.

This book is not an easy read. It broke my heart a million times over. China, Skeetah's pit bull, is a fighting dog and as a person who loves pit bulls and has some very close family and friends who have pits as pets, the whole dogfighting business makes me extremely angry. So it was not the best for me to be reading about people fighting these precious, intelligent, loving, sweet animals. This was probably the most difficult aspect of the book for me, although the family does experience the actual hurricane and that portion of the book was hard to read too. Just know that while this story is not an easy one to read, it is certainly rewarding in the end.

Salvage the Bones elicited so many emotions in me as I was reading it. I was so frustrated by Esch's father's inability (or unwillingness) to take care of his family properly. Esch essentially raised her youngest brother, Junior, on her own after their mother died during his childbirth. I was so angry at the boy who got Esch pregnant as he didn't care for her at all and was, in the most clear and simple case of this I've seen in fiction, just using her for sex. I was heartbroken and mad about the fighting dogs. But mostly, the book made me feel an overwhelming sadness, the overwhelming feeling that this family just could not get it together, that things would never turn around for them. Their situation was just so upsetting, so heartbreaking, that I couldn't help but feel despair while reading about it. In fact, toward the middle of the novel there is a dogfighting scene, at which point I burst into tears and didn't stop crying until the end of the book. It affected me that much.

Salvage the Bones is an excellent, haunting novel that brought me to tears. Not much about this book is hopeful or happy, but there is a glimmer of something there at the end that makes it all worth the journey through this family's pain. This novel absolutely broke my heart, but at the same time I can't help but recommend that you read it too.

This book is one of those that has been sitting there, taunting me, for ages. I've wanted to read, but I just never had the chance. Then it came through on one my book groups and I not only had the chance, but the obligation (well, maybe that's too strong of a word) to read it.

I had been reading a lot of "lighter" works before this, so it was good to get back into a book I could really sink my teeth into and, on that count, this book did not disappoint. I loved Ward's lyrical prose--I fell into it effortlessly. It contrasted drastically with the dialogue of the book, which is much more in dialect. I felt the juxtaposition between these to elements effectively illustrated how those that many discount as being "lower class" live just as rich lives as everyone else.

This story is told 12 days, up to and including Hurricane Katrina. Because of this, I think there was a certain pace that Ward was required to meet, and she did so beautifully. The book builds up intensity and the emotional climax of the book comes just as the family is trying to survive the storm. Yet, the true beauty emerges as they have to face the devastation.

Esch is a fascinating character--a girl who, because of her place in society, seems doomed to a certain type of life. Yet, it is clear that she is so much more. Several times while reading this novel, my heart broke for her. As for her brothers, I will admit it took me a little while to keep some of them, namely Skeeter and Randall, straight. But, once I had that down, I found them to be as faceted as Esch. The portrait of the family as a whole is one that will, if you'll excuse the cliche, restore your faith in humanity.

I do feel I should put this out there, and this is not a criticism of the book, but rather an issue with my own preferences and comfort level. I have a very hard time with dog fighting, and there are some very graphic descriptions of it in this book. I'm not saying they are not necessary, as Ward clearly uses them to illustrate the struggles of the human characters, but they were very, very hard for me to read. If this is something that might be an issue for you, please take note.

I'm so glad I finally got that push to read this book. It was well worth the wait and the read and something I would recommend to almost anyone.

I must have been twelve or thirteen years old, and I was in a department store with my mother and brother, who was just a baby at that time. I was left in charge of watching my brother in his stroller while my mother went to stand in line to pay for some things at the register. While I was waiting, a woman came up to me and she asked me, "Is that your baby?" And I told her, "No. He's my brother." And she walked off. But her question upset and offended me. To think that I could have a baby. Now this was the time of daytime talk shows like Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake and Maury Povich(where practically every day on that show was paternity test day), so I did know that girls, sometimes as young as eleven, twelve and thirteen, were having sex and getting pregnant. But I still didn't like the insinuation this stranger, this woman, was making about me. So, reading Jesmyn Ward's novel, "Salvage the Bones," about Esch, a fourteen year old girl, who finds out she's pregnant, brought to mind this encounter in a department store. And if I didn't like the feeling of being mistaken for a mother of a baby at the age of twelve or thirteen, I can only imagine what the reality is for a young girl who finds out she will be a mother.

"Two lines means that you are pregnant. You are pregnant. I am pregnant. I sit up and curl over my knees, rub my eyes against my kneecaps. The terrible truth of what I am flares like a dry fall fire in my stomach, eating all the fallen pine needles. There is something there."-excerpt

In the novel, Esch hides her pregnancy from her family--her father and three brothers(Randall, Skeetah and Junior). Her mother past away seven years ago after giving birth to her youngest brother Junior. Her father when not drunk is obsessed with getting the family home ready for the impending storm season. One storm in particular is Hurricane Katrina.

"The bayou is where we had thought the water would come from, the reason we thought we were safe, but Katrina surprised everyone with her uncompromising strength, her forcefulness, the way she lingered; she made things happen that had never happened before."-excerpt

Esch's father doesn't notice anything is amiss with his daughter. The ONLY person that could have put the pieces of the puzzle together was Esch's brother Skeetah, but he too, like his father, is caught up in his own obsessions--his dog China's first litter of puppies and dog fighting--to really notice what's going on with his sister. Then, there's the older teenage boy who got Esch pregnant. He doesn't care about her, respect, or even love her. He already has a girlfriend. He just uses Esch for sex. But Esch, unfortunately, doesn't see this for what it is. She's too infatuated with him. (I thought this guy was a jerk who deliberately used a young and vulnerable teenage girl.)

Overall, I would give the novel 3.5 stars out of 5. Didn't care too much for the dog fighting match/scenes that came midway through the novel, but it was part of telling the story.

I am from Mississippi and found the book filthy and disgusting. The thought of dogs fighting is against everything I believe in. I realize some people speak in a certain venacular, but the language was way too much for me. I thought the book was going to be more about the hurricane. I cannot understand how anyone could give this book 5 stars.

This book should be at the top of your list. Read it with the people you love, read it with the people you hate, and then put all of those people in the same room and discuss. With any luck Salvage will have you reconsidering your assumptions about every relationship in your life. If you’re reading a book review on the store you are clearly committed enough to your reading experience that you will probably put the time and energy into reading this book that it deserves (and you probably don’t pay much attention to actual critics - smart move - or else you would be in a real book store (you should still go buy this book in a real bookstore, seriously)) but you are probably also seeking a buzz-wordy review that will make you feel like you’ve done something good by reading this book. Don’t read this book to feel like you’ve done something significant. Read this book because it contains something significant. Ward’s depiction of black womanhood in the United States adds a critical voice to the current feminist movement as we are failing already to remember women of color in our fight for equal pay, equal treatment and better access to reproductive health care. The social, emotional and intellectual value of this book can’t be understated and if this book does not inspire you to stand up and fight against racial and gender disparities in this country, read it a second time. But also, if you love good prose, complex characters or quasi-epic plots recalling those Greek myths you geeked out over in high school, this book may also be for you. Just don’t read it with an expecting dog at your side like I did.

(Contains spoilers)

Wow. Salvage the Bones is a deeply moving novel. It is the kind of book that will be assigned in English classes for semesters to come because of its timeless quality and thought-provoking look into Hurricane Katrina. What separates Salvage the Bones from other Katrina stories is that most of it takes place before the storm. Readers who wish that Ward extend the novel into the aftermath of the hurricane may be unfamiliar with the fact that Katrina was notorious for the government’s slow response. Ward’s silence in terms of the aftermath is a powerful statement itself.

But Salvage the Bones is not just about the hurricane. It’s an illustration of systemic racism in the American south. For instance, Ward writes about calls from the government urging locals to evacuate before Katrina makes landfall. The repetition of these calls becomes an important reminder that Esch’s family and the neighborhoods around the Pit cannot evacuate: they don’t have the means to nor do they have a place to go.

Salvage the Bones is also a deeply inspiring portrayal about irrevocable commitment to family and pets. I am struck most by Ward’s ability to endear us to all of her characters, even China the dog, who’s just as fascinating as the human characters. Even the kind-of annoying characters, like Esch’s father or Manny, the golden-boy, are understandable. Ward is able to entrance in a number of ways. Her lyrical sentences give the story a heartbeat that is ever-present during the reading experience. The structure of the story – broken up into days – is a clever tool to gradually intensify the storm and build suspense. There is nothing superfluous to draw our attention away. Plus she gives us so many things to root for: China’s puppies, Randall’s basketball scholarship, Esch’s child.

The descriptions of the storm are especially alluring. Ward brings Katrina to life as a merciless, petrifying figure. It’s been two months since I’ve read Salvage the Bones, but I still remember the sound the of the storm’s “laugh,” or the wind sounding like a train. In a New York Times article, David Mendelsohn cautions writers against writing about tragedy too early because not enough time has passed to create a significant picture of the account. But Ward manages the intimate perspective masterfully through her prose. Also, the fact that storm is almost a secondary character for most of the novel allows Ward to reclaim her community from the storm for a brief moment. It’s as if she’s taking the power back from Katrina. And this is a brilliant way to handle tragedy.

As for drawbacks, I think the only thing I didn’t like about the novel was the glamorization of dogfighting and the exhaustive use of similes. In spite of that, Ward sucked me in so hard that by the time I was done reading, I was a little jarred that it was over.

Before reading the headline and deciding that I am simply an uncultured swine, please read the length (or summation) of my review.

Having just finished The Great Gatsby for my AP English Literature and Composition class, I was eager to engross myself within the story of a new book. What book would be next? Oh, what book would I study so attentively from cover to cover? (Or in this case, lazily drag myself kicking and screaming from Page to page). I am not sure where to begin, why not start at the beginning? It seems a very fine place to start. Within twenty pages, the main character (whom my class has surmised to be of about 15 years old) is shown to be very sexually promiscuous, her brother is revealed to profit from and enjoy dog fighting, her father is shown to be an alcoholic, and her family is described as being, essentially, a backwoods group of semi-incestuous rednecks (am I wrong?). Moving right along whilst skipping a very large rant about how dreadful a read this was, the main characters are shown to: steal, fight, promote dog fighting, have random sex, and generally not care about any of it. Midway through this book, my friends were genuinely rooting for the hurricane and, while I could not bring myself to admit it, I couldn’t blame them for it either.

Summation:
Now it was again only a book of seemingly random words. John’s count of neurons had diminished by two hundred and fifty eight (the number of pages in this book).

All of that and I didn’t even mention that the southern jargon this book is written in makes me want to senselessly bash it with a dictionary in a feeble attempt to correct the varrying sentences and dialogue.

This book is not always easy reading by any means. There's some gritty material, and certainly some things that aren't for the faint hearted. The author doesn't shy away from complex, not always functional sexual relationships or objectionable activities - like dog fighting. But she treats all her characters with a complex compassion, with empathy instead of judgment or easy moralizing. In particular, I'm aware that she writes a lot about young black men who the world tends to perceive in particular ways. She doesn't pretend they're innocents, but she does show the complexity of them as siblings, sons, friends and lovers. She brings most readers into places they're unlikely to visit otherwise and, I think, gives readers glimpses of the humanity of people they might not otherwise connect with. That's marvelous. I'm a fan of this author, that's for sure.

In the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the Batiste family of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi is in a race against time amidst the backdrop of poverty, survival, disenfranchisement, and the world of southern dog fights. In Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, readers see a side of southern life in a rural bayou, black community.

Esch is 14- years old, a motherless girl child in a household of males, including an emotionally distant father who favors the bottle. In a temporary sober state, Claude Batiste begins preparing for the coming storm. He is gathering supplies to rev up the house and constantly warning his four children to begin gathering food. As Esch and the oldest son, Randall, are counting the cans of potted meat and bags of Top Ramen and eggs from their few chickens that the family survives on, second eldest Skeetah is only concerned about his beloved, prize-winning pit bull, China, and the birth of her pups. Oblivious to the coming danger and the family's meager means is the baby, Junior who is about five or six- years old, born on the night his mother died and raised by Esch and Randall.

Esch's days are filled with memories of her mother, reading and daydreaming about Medea, Jason and other Greek mythological characters and discovering there is a new life growing within her. She has been promiscuous but she knows this baby's father is Manny, the cute guy who has a jealous girlfriend. Lacking friends, women confidants or maternal guidance, Esch just drifts from day to day hurtling towards an unknown future, as uncertain as the coming storm.

In an area with high unemployment, crumbling living conditions, and lack of ambition, the young people drift into what life brings them. Randall's hope are pinned on getting a nod from a college basketball scout while Skeetah and his peers are locked in a battle of whose bitch is the baddest, which pit is going to reign supreme. Money being short, the winning title is the prize itself, sometimes to settle a beef.

Told in 12 chapters of 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, the story pacing tended to move slowly at times. However, in her sophomore project Ward has managed to capture the culture and traditions of black Gulf Coast residents living on the edge as she did in her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds. The author relays the despair and hopelessness of young people while capturing their depth of maturity and unapologetic pride. Her adept painting of the unquestioned love between Skeetah and his beloved, China was amazing and gave me a better understanding of how and why the culture of dog fights exists and caused me to suspend judgment of this practice to a certain extent.

Ward is quickly making a name for herself in southern literature, picking up the mantle in the vein of such accomplished Gulf Coast authors as Ernest Gaines and Lynn Emery. I recommend this book to those who enjoy literature set in the Gulf Coast.

Dera R. Williams
APOOO Literary Zone

Ward’s Salvage the Bones weaves together such an intimate portrait of sibling and family dynamics while dealing with such overwhelming topics concerning race, socioeconomic status, and stereotyping in the face of one of the most infamous natural disasters and politically disastrous responses from the federal government, Hurricane Katrina. Specifically, Ward’s ability to navigate the difficult space wherein her characters lean into stereotypes, notably Skeetah’s dog-fighting and Esch’s pregnancy, while simultaneously complicating these cultural assumptions with the depth and complexity she affords these characters is thoughtfully and intricately done and creates room for the difficult conversation about the place, prevalence, and double consciousness of these stereotypes within this community whose existence is not nearly as simple as outsiders may believe. Even further, Junior’s character development throughout the text is fascinating, as he originally asserts his maturity because he yearns to be treated as an adult despite the way his siblings treat him as a baby. Yet the moment he is treated as an adult and sees the horrors of the adult world caused by Katrina, Ward alludes to Faulkner as Junior rocks back and forth and closes his eyes in an attempt to block out the outside world. All the characters are incredibly complex creations, but Junior in particular is someone who, because of his insider-outsider perspective, occupies a significant narrative space and plays a different role than the majority of the other characters. While I believe this text is an incredibly powerful and dynamic piece of literature, Skeetah’s dog China is a problematic figure for me. I don’t quite understand why this dog, constantly described as being the purest white color yet dirtied by the mud of the Pit, is named China. I have yet to understand the significance of this name in connection with the rest of the text, though I cannot believe it was chosen haphazardly.

Following Hurricane Katrina, a slew of books about it came out in quick succession over the course of a year or two. It was a "popular" topic and I avoided every single one. I try not to read books that are written by authors who are attempting to capitalize on a catastrophic event while the event is still unfolding. There's a big difference between historical fiction and riding that wave. So, even though it's 8 years later, I was hesitant to read this book.

I'm not sure where I first saw it, but it had a good review and one of the things that jumped out at me what that the reviewer went out of their way to say that while this was a book that took place during Hurricane Katrina, the hurricane is a backdrop and in no way dictates the story. Basically, it could have been any number of hurricanes or rainstorms down in the bayou, and that the author was not attempting to profit from a sensational story about tragedy.

Let me just say that I flew through this book and the writer of that review (thanks to whoever you are) was entirely correct. Hurricane Katrina set the tone for the book, but did not propel the story on its own. Instead, the book takes place over 12 days, with each chapter representing a day and beginning the day Hurricane Katrina formed while ending after she makes landfall.

The story itself is about the Batiste family, who live in fictional Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Poor and living in the Pit, Esche and her three brothers struggle with day to day life 9 years after the death of their mother. While Esche is coming to terms with her own personal problems, her brother Skeetah is trying to take care of the new puppies his prized fighter pit bull, China, gave birth to. Meanwhile, Randall is trying to win a scholarship to basketball camp and Junior, the baby of the family, is just trying to keep up and not be left behind. I love that the author gives the reader a glimpse into the daily lives of a poverty-stricken family without evoking pity. Instead, their financial situation is simply a way of life and not something that they focus on or complain about.

I must point out that dogfighting is a big part of this book and that Chapter 8 was some of the most intense and difficult reading I have ever read (they also eat a shark, which I'm sure bothers me more than most people because I'm a huge shark conservationist). Despite these difficulties, it is a great book. It's not a sunshine and rainbows book, but I think it has widespread appeal. The writing style, which is similar to Precious, Room, and The Help, is not one I typically enjoy. In fact, I haven't read any of the books I just mentioned because I can't get through the first chapter. BUT, I was able to get through this one with flying colors and I think it's a great read for anyone who is interested in the the region.

You really just need to pick up Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. I could just end my review right there.

But I guess I won't. I'll tell you a little more.

Over the course of twelve days, you learn about a poor family in Mississippi, before, during, and after a large hurricane sweeps through town. You may have heard of this hurricane. It's Katrina.

Esch's father is very concerned about the hurricane, but he doesn't stay sober enough to make sure all of the plans go through properly. Esch hasn't been feeling well, and has an inkling of why her stomach seems to be growing. Her brother Skeetah is consumed with his fighting dog and her puppies. Esch's brothers Randall and Junior don't really seem to have specific places where they fit in.

As the days loom closer to the hurricane's arrival, as a reader, I was nervous for them! I kept thinking: how can they be experiencing daily life when they need to be so much more prepared? But Esch's family had no way of knowing what would happen. . . and what would happen to them.

What kind of natural disasters do you have where you live?

Thanks for reading,

Rebecca @ Love at First Book

The first few pages had me doubting that I would like this book; but I stuck with it and after awhile I was hooked!

I thought the author did a good job with the character development.... considering the entire span of the book just covered the 12 days before Katrina hit. They were real enough to me that I felt so many different emotions as I read about their day to day lives. There are parts that are brutal and it was almost painful to read at times - but yet I was so sucked into it..... I couldn't stop. It was like the intensity of the story increased as Katrina came closer and closer.

There were many times throughout the book that I wanted to knock some sense into the various characters for their behavior and actions, but in the end the family members pulled together and did what was necessary to help each other survive. It's difficult for me to imagine what it would be like to live in their shoes.... the extreme poverty, the lack of parental involvement, etc. Some of the things they did just to survive and entertain themselves were shocking.

There was no sugar coating in this book..... it was raw, gritty, brutal and real and it certainly captured my attention!

Read in 2012

As someone who's from the Pass Christian/DeLisle area, on which Bois Savage is based, I have to say the way Ms. Ward captured the community was shockingly accurate. I knew exactly where she was describing with each newly set scene. For those who think she may have exaggerated for literary effect, rest assured, she did an amazing job of describing the community and subcommunities. The economic disparities in Bois Savage are as clear as those in real life. The seemingly random destruction pattern Katrina followed (Big Henry's house suffering only some downed trees) is just as accurate.

My stubborn mother and our family labrador retriever, Molly, stayed in Pass Christian during Hurricane Katrina and both were forced to swim to a neighboring home on pilings as the storm surge picked up my childhood home from its foundation, spun it 45 degrees and sat it down about 10 feet over. She crawled into an attic, taking Molly (tied to an igloo cooler as a float) with her as long as possible, until she had to let her go. "It was me or the dog," she later told me. Upon opening the paper on August 28, 2005 and discovering Katrina was category 5 hurricane, I pleaded with my mother to escape hours inland. She didn't, justifying her stay by saying, "This house survived Camille."

SPOILER ALERT

Reading the chapter in which the family swims in a calm panic to the other house and Skeetah (also a community nickname for a friend of mine) lets China go, I cried uncontrollably. It brought back emotions about a terrifying family event that I thought could never be so beautifully described.

On August 29, 2005, Esch describes the water flooding their house starting first with her toes, ankles, shins, knees and thighs. I received a phone call from my mother describing the same. From over 200 miles away, I told her the eye of the storm had not even made landfall yet. I received three phone calls (much to disbelief in hindsight) from my mother as she escaped our house to the attic of another, giving updates on the water levels. The final phone call ended with, "I had to let Molly go. She was fighting going in the attic with me. I love you. Tell your sister I love her."

I didn't hear from her for two days after that.

The novel ends with Skeetah waiting for China to return. Hoping. Believing.

China returns.

A week after Katrina, Molly was featured on a news station in Jackson, Miss. She still had her tags and the rescuers were looking for the owners. My sister's friend saw her, called us and Molly came home, where she passed away in December 2010 at the age of 13.

I am at a loss to understand the positive reviews on this book . While I get the style of writing to reflect the environment in which the story takes place , I cannot but see it as off putting to most readers. Additionally, the repetitive scenes of dog breeding , dog pupping ,
dog dying and dog mistreatment are over the top .
I will try another book by this author just to ascertain that this one wasn’t an anomaly.

This bighearted, voluptuous, riveting book - one of my favorites of the decade - is filled with contradictions. It tells an apocalyptic and ancient tale but its topic is fresh and timely. It is told without any pretensions yet it's lyrical and bracing. It focuses on the microcosm of a family under pressure yet its theme is universal and its messages integrate age-old mythologies.

As the book opens, China - the pure white pit bull - is turning on herself, trying to eat her paws. The winds of Hurricane Katrina are gathering force. And the narrator, a young precocious and sensitive teenager named Esch, is realizing that she is pregnant. These forces and situations add up to classic tragedy, but Jesmyn Ward has other things in mind. Esch and her brothers - Skeetah, whose life and passions revolve around his prized dog and her puppies...Randall, whose dream is to get a basketball camp scholarship...and Junior, the youngest - are a unit who support each other.

As Katrina closes in...as the internal storms play out...we view a world that is steeped with violence and tenderness. Nothing is as expected. Let me interject that I share my home with two dogs and every cell of my body abhors pit bull fighting. Yet when the inevitable scene arrived, it shattered every single one of my expectations. Skeetah massages and speaks to China like a lover; his rival coaches Kilo, the other dog, calling him "son." Some of it is written in love language: "China flings her head back into the air as if eating oxygen, gaining strength, and burns back down to Kilo and takes his neck in her teeth. She bears down, curling to him, a loving flame, and licks." This is a book that dares you to confront yourself at an elemental level.

As an added level, Jesmyn Ward weaves in the Medea and Jason story and other Greek myths. Esch is young in years, but old in wisdom: she already knows that "There is never a meeting in the middle. There is only a body in the ditch, and one person walking toward or away from it." While she is tethered to earth - her father's hands are "like gravel", her brother's blood "smells like wet hot earth", her mind is unleashed and floats to the sky.

The tenderness - yes, tenderness! - between Skeetah and China, the bond between China and Esch ("China will bark and call me sister. In the star-suffocated sky, there is a waiting silence"), and the desperation and love of this family elevates it far beyond most other contemporary books I have read. A day after reading it, I am still in its thrall.

Sometimes you take out a book because of awards, accolades or other hysteria which brought hoards of readers to the bookstores. As the National Book Award winner, this book caught my attention. Without that award, I probably would never have read this novel. When finished, I asked myself - was it worthy? Yes. Very much, yes.

Utilizing many of the techniques of prior authors, this author nevertheless seems to create a new footprint, her own style, which makes this novel both attractive and violent. The literal review of the simple life of teenagers and preteens in rural Louisiana in the 21st century is different from most of what we know. Delivering the story in the eyes of a pregnant young teen is very different. Doing such with the accuracy and emotional level of the teenager is very impressive - especially when poignantly depicted in such young eyes as the great Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

As a southerner who lived through Hurricanes Andrew, and then 2005's Katrina and Wilma, I have a heartfelt attraction to those who write about the same. Depicting the horror of a hurricane is something of a personal fascination. Personifying Mother Nature's terror with a human or animalistic character - something akin to religion's anthromorphism - this author reminds me of the great and similar passages delivered by Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Amid the naive and telling passages of the brothers and sisters who live carefree and without worry within the confines of their motherless and impoverished life, two chapters can make the average reader cringe and even hurt. Somehow, these children -- like the cast of characters in To Kill a Mockingbird-- see things which children often do not, and should not, see. In these occasional adult themed scenes, the author graphically outlines pitbull fights handled by the young brothers and cousins; and, then does even better with the bigger and badder animal - Katrina.

The story line is solid. The writing equally or greater. One passage at the end describes the sights of the town which Katrina visited: "Narrow streets where dentists' offices were, where restaurants that served catfish and hush puppies were, where veterinarians' offices were, where small dim bookstores and the kinds of antiques stores that I would never dream of walking into for fear of breaking something have been savaged; all the storm left are boards and siding stacked like pancakes flung on plates of concrete slabs."

To be compared to the novels listed above is an honor to any author. But, in this instance, the comparison is well deserved.

Having been to New Orleans to work on Hurricane Katrina's devastating damage, I was drawn to this book. I wasn't sure at first that I really liked the slow moving style of the book. However, it did mirror the travel of a hurricane! And after I finished, I did basically like the book as it really showed how many people in that area just truly did not think the destruction would be so massive. The author really showed the life of this dysfunctional family, but how they were drawn together during this time. What I did not like was all the descriptive language in the book....the similes and metaphors were TOTALLY overdone and there were many times I wanted to ditch the book and not finish it. However, I AM glad I stuck it out...just reader beware...found myself at times just skimming these sections!

National Book Award Winner.

Books like this are rare. Even more rare are novels of this depth that are also riveting to the point that you don't want to stop reading because the story is that compelling. Ward has written a bleak and violent masterpiece of great beauty. As bleak and tragic as this novel is, it is also filled with hope, love and tenderness. While she is so original that I won't compare her writing to anyone, I would say that if you are a fan of McCarthy and Faulkner you will find this novel to be satisfying and worthy of sitting on a shelf with the best of them.

The story starts with the tale of a family, a very intelligent girl obsessed with classical literature (particularly the story of Medea) and her brothers and father. It is a story of dog-fighting, familial love and loyalty, and children growing up amid the destruction caused by extreme poverty as they struggle to live and better themselves in the hot swirling dirt of a blasted out Delta town.

Then Katrina hits.

I can see a class devoting weeks to this fine novel, delving into character studies, exploring the overreaching themes of loyalty, love, motherhood, loss, and revenge, tracing the parallels to classical literature. It would be time well spent. This novel is that good. I will be thinking about it for weeks while at the same time recommending it to everyone that I know.

In Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the radio warns of an impending hurricane, but the Batiste children aren't worried. Only their hard-drinking, widowed father is concerned that this hurricane will be worse than all of the others his family has experienced.

As Daddy prepares for the hurricane, Esch, our fifteen-year-old narrator, struggles with her discovery that she is pregnant; Skeeter takes care of his prized pit bull, China, and her newborn puppies; Randall practices for an important basketball game; and Junior, the youngest, is just gets into everyone else's business.

Beginning ten days before Hurricane Katrina and ending the day after, Salvage the Bones is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of Southern poverty and one of the greatest natural disasters to hit the U.S. Esh is a young girl surrounded by brothers and male friends, and in an environment that doesn't empower her, she finds it easier to sleep with the boys who are after her than to resist. As a result, she becomes pregnant by Skeeter's best friend, Manny, who uses her for sex but doesn't have any real feelings for her. However, being a love-starved 15-year-old, Esch is in love with him and desperately wishes for him to care about her.

I found Esch to be a very believable character. She is more in love with the idea of Manny than with his actual character -- who hasn't been there? She also has this naive hope that the man who is screwing her will change and love her, which is frustrating to read but relatable. Perhaps my favorite thing about her is her love of Greek mythology. She is assigned to read Edith Hamilton's Mythology, a book that I devoured in high school, and is obsessed with the Medea story. She keeps trying to draw parallels between herself and this mythological woman, and it felt so realistic.

Jesmyn Ward also does a great job of portraying the life of this poor family and the culture of their community. It's not a culture I'm familiar with, and I was impressed by Ward's ability to write about the Batiste's poverty in a neutral way; it is simply a fact of their existence, and they get along the best they can.

However, her descriptions of dog fighting may be problematic for some readers. She portrays dog fighting not as abusive but as an accepted part of the culture, and there is one long description of dog fighting that is very graphic and violent. It was hard to read, and I was revolted by the attitude the boys have that fighting their dogs is a matter of macho honor.

Ward's writing is gorgeous, full of ice and fire and lush descriptions. Her descriptions of the woods are lovely, her writing about the fierce power of the hurricane is glorious, and Esch's observations of Katrina's aftermath are heartbreakingly powerful. However, as much as I love rich prose, the metaphors were sometimes a little too thick on the ground -- and how often does she really need to describe the sweat glinting off her characters' bodies?

"It's Manny. Both of his hands are on the top of the doorsill, and he leans into the door, stretching his body like taffy. All I can see is the shadow of him and the white of his smile. It feels wrong to not be able to see his face, seems wrong that he is as dark as me now, that he would be washed dark by the sun behind him like ink set to bleeding over waterlogged paper."

I would definitely recommend reading Salvage the Bones. The writing is beautiful, lyrical, and rhythmic, and Esh makes an intriguing narrator. It's also an interesting look into another culture and has interesting themes of family loyalty and the meaning of motherhood.

More book reviews at Books Speak Volumes, a book blog.

Salvage the Bone is the story of a family in a small Mississppi town. It set 12 days before Hurricane Katrina is suppose to hit. The story is told by Esch the lone female voice. Esch lives with her father and three brother. The mother died giving birth to the youngest son. Ward's does an excellent job of building this families world. I understood were every character was coming from. A large part of this story is the relationship Esch's older brother Skeetah has with his pit bull China. With Skeetah, Ward created a character that took part in dog fights that not only did I not dislike but cared very much for. One would have to read the novel to believe me but its obivious how much Skeetah loves China. There are moments when my heart broke watching Esch, wanting someone to love her as much as Skeetah does his dog. The family is preparing for coming hurricane but that is very much in the background. Esch voice captured me from the very beginning, there's such an honest beauty to it that I loved.

Esch is around 15 or 16 before reading Salvage the Bone, I thought it might have some YA crossover appeal. After reading it I know its true. Since it's fiction and not YA there will be adult content. However, I truly appreciated how everything was a reflection of reality. The author doesn't feel the need to over do it with language or sex because the strength of the writing entice and keep the readers interest.

In "Salvage the Bones," Jesmyn Ward gives us twelve days in the life of a remarkable girl: Esch.

Esch has a life that looks chaotic from the outside--and the inside. Her family is doing their best with what they have--but they don't have much. Their mother died when Esch was 8 and she and her older brother are the closest replacements for parents that their younger brother have. Their father seems to be still confused and bewildered at losing his wife (the alcohol doesn't help). The middle brother is trying to improve their lot, so the rest of the family supports him--even though he is obsessive about it and has probably chosen one of the worst ways to make progress.

Life for the family is rough enough, but when their father seems panicky over an approaching hurricane, it seems to get more chaotic. Their father makes everyone get ready, even though the rest of the family thinks he is overdoing it and he has an accident that takes him out of action.

Hurricane Katrina shows that this time, at least, he was right.

Ms. Ward gives us a hero whom we can admire for her willingness to do what she can for her family and herself. Esch and her family are the everyday sort of people who demonstrate that love and just doing what has to be done are heroic.

Ms. Ward's writing is a pleasure to read. (I would go into more detail about her writing, but I think that pretty much sums it up.)

This is what it means to be 15 and motherless and pregnant and poor in Coastal Mississippi just as Hurricane Katrina is headed your way. Yet from this comes a story, not of despair, but of the fierce saving power of family love, written in a voice both poetic and extravagant, giving it almost the quality of myth.

The protagonist, Esch, is the only girl in a family consisting of her father, who sometimes drinks to excess and becomes violent; an older brother, who hopes to make his way out of poverty through basketball; a just-younger brother, who seems to give most of his love to his prize pit bull; and a much younger brother, who has been cared for and reared mostly by his siblings. The story all takes place in 11 days, leading up to, through, and just after Hurricane Katrina.

Sometimes the narrative is hard-to-take, such as the scenes of a dogfight. Sometimes it is heartbreaking, such as when Esch realizes that the father of her coming baby cares nothing for her. Sometimes it is breath-taking, such as the scenes of the escape from the storm. Sometimes it is even a little over-the-top in its use of similes and metaphors, however poetic they may be. But always it is present and immediate and powerful, particularly in depictions of the surroundings and of the oppressive weather.

This is a writer who knows the South intimately, and this book reminds me very much of William Faulkner, particularly of his novel As I Lay Dying. It has something of the same feel of language and of the mythic quality of the narrative. At the same time, however, it is very specific and concrete in its depictions of the emotions of its teenage characters. This is, in short, a savage and beautiful novel.

Esch, a pregnant teenager, lives with her 3 brothers and alcoholic father in the Mississippi Gulf area, and a storm's a-brewin'. One of the brothers, Skeetah, owns a female pitbull, China, that he loves dearly, but he is just as enamored with the money she can bring in as a fighter. Her first litter of puppies represents an additional source of income, and Skeetah becomes desperate to save all of the dogs when one dies of an unknown cause. In the meantime, the family's father tries valiantly to lead the whole crew in making preparations for the hurricane that is on its way. On the one hand, it's hard to imagine how things could get much worse, but their desperate scramble to survive the disaster is one of the most gripping pieces of writing that I've read in a while. Esch sprinkles her narration of all this with tales from Greek mythology and compares her own situation to Medea's. I know these passages are supposed to lend a mystical aura to the story, but, really, this family's struggle is dramatic enough. The more interesting and appropriate parallel, I think, is between Esch and the dog China, both having to adapt to the idea of motherhood. Furthermore, Esch's mother died bearing the last of Esch's three brothers, and this tragedy haunts them all. Esch and China both live in a man's world, doing the bidding of the male figures that surround them. Esch, caught up in her infatuation with her baby's father, who won't even look at her, needs to face her future realistically. China has even fewer options but seems to be of more concern, at least to Skeetah, than Esch, who withholds the fact of her pregnancy as long as possible. The real authority, though, lies with a storm named Katrina.

First I have to say that I was very annoyed by the inability of the author to be consistent in Esch’s age. On page 1, she was eight when Junior was born. On page 217, she was nine when he was born. “The first hurricane that I remember happened when I was nine…Her stomach was big with Junior…she’d had me and Skeetah and Randall a year apart each, and then nothing else for nine years.”

On page 2 Skeetah is sixteen and Randall is seventeen. That should make Esch 15. But if she is nine when Junior was born and he is seven, that makes her sixteen.

Okay, minor point, but inconsistencies like that grab my attention.

Then, I loved her metaphors and similes—some of them were brilliant—but I could have done with half the number. They sort of lose their punch when there are so many.

And I loved the story, the love between the five of them and their friends, and you know they will all pull together to help Esch through this pregnancy. Esch is fully realized to me, half-smart, half-dumb, like most of us.

I particularly loved the relationship between Skeetah and China (I have a dog and know how it feels to love one that much and to feel in communication with her), although I found the dogfight scenes painful to read—I abhor dogfighting. China comes back in the end. She must.

I was pleased to read about a way of life I have no real understanding of and overall I thought it was a good read. I read it in two days.

The Batiste family is poor, the world they inhabit is violent and hard, they have no help but each other...and in just 12 days, Hurricane Katrina will devastate their tiny Mississippi town, Bois Sauvage. This family needs a mother, but she died seven years ago after giving birth to the youngest child, Junior. The father drinks away his grief, and the kids: Randall, Skeetah, Esch, and Junior, raise themselves as best as they can. Esch, 15, the lone female in this family, gives sex to any boy who asks. She loves her brothers, is a keen observer of them, how they move, what makes them laugh, where they are tough and where they hurt. She is in love with Manny, her brother's friend, but to him she is something to be used and forgotten. For five months they've been having sex and she is pregnant with his child, but he has never kissed her, never looked her in the eye during lovemaking, never held her hand. Her brother Skeetah keeps a fighting dog, a pure white pit bull named China who can be trusted to mind only him. She is undefeated in the neighborhood fights, and she's recently had puppies. Skeetah is utterly obsessed with China, with her diet, with her training, with her honor or reputation as a fighter, with her adjustment to motherhood (which is not going well). But while he seems oblivious to others in the family, Esch knows he keeps an eye on things, and on Esch, in particular. It means a lot to her, a girl who feels invisible most of the time, to know her brother sees her, sees her heart. Woven throughout this taut tale is the ancient Greek myth of Medea, whom Esch identifies with, and a sense that the worst losses in life can be endured. There is stomach-turning violence in this book. There is cruelty that breaks the heart. In the end, the bleakness of life for the Batistes is the same as it was at the beginning. But can say that at the end of Ward's novel, you will love them, especially Esch and Skeetah, love them and never forget them.

I picked up Salvage the Bones after seeing, surprisingly, that it made it onto the NY Times 100 Notable Books of 2012. I say surprisingly because I am pretty sure that this book was published in 2011 and was therefore not eligible for the list. But I guess in the greater scheme of things that is splitting hairs. I am glad I did pick it up as it has been one of the best books I have read to date in 2013.

The author tells about a poor family in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi and we meet them some days before Hurricane Katrina makes land-fall. The father is busily preparing the family's ramshackle house for the hurricane while his teen kids, and one 7 year old, who are quite independent are off doing their own thing, getting into mischief and creating havoc with their friends. Esch who is the primary character in the book is a 14 year old girl who seems to have slept with quite a number of boys more or less because they asked her to. Her brother Skeetah is breeding a dog named China for dogfighting. Randall is an aspiring basketball star. And young Junior who is only 7 is a basic tag along kid. The amount of trouble they get into primarily because they have nothing else to do and a poor support structure at home is astounding and your heart will wrench as you feel for these kids. One other interesting note--I thought the author did an incredible job describing the underworld of dogfighting with some incredibly vivid and hard to take scenes. Overall, a very good book that you will race through and I highly recommend.

Few things get my attention as quickly as a come-from-behind award win by a new or not widely known author. And the 2011 National Book Award was won by a come-from-behind, not widely known author: Jesmyn Ward, author of the previous novel Where the Line Bleeds.

Ward is assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama. For 2010 - 2011 she was the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. From 2008 - 2010 she had a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University.

Need I say it? She is a writer of exceptional talent and potential. And - Hello World! - now everyone knows it.

Salvage the Bones is set in the Mississippi Gulf hamlet of Bois Sauvage, in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. The patriarch of the Batiste family is attuned to the impending disaster, smelling danger in the air. Having delivered his family through the furor of Camille, preparation is his obsession:

"Makes my bones hurt," Daddy said. "I can feel them coming."

Meanwhile, China - veteran dog-fight winning pit bull - is preparing to give birth to her first litter of puppies. And Esch, the fifteen-year old daughter is coming to a realization: she's pregnant by one of her brothers' friends. Juxtaposed with both of these events is the memory of their mother's death after giving birth:

"Maybe you need to help her [China] push," I [Esch] say. Sometime I think that is what killed Mama. I can see her, chin to chest, straining to push Junior out, and Junior snagging on her insides, grabbing hold of what he caught on to try to stay inside her, but instead he pulled it out with him when he was born."

The Batistes are a close family whose love and loyalty to one another are central to the story, stronger than the Job-like challenges they face and stare down. The father is an alcoholic who sometimes flies into drunken rages - mostly taken out on his son Skeetah - but even that doesn't diminish their cohesive family unit. They are as attuned to one another as their father to the oncoming storm, as China the pit bull to her owner, Skeetah. Their love, unconditional.

As the oppressive heat pushed ahead of Katrina bears down on them, Esch, Skeetah and their father face the personal trials of their lives. Esch - filled with the story of Medea she's been reading - is trying to conceal her pregnancy from her family, while dreaming the father of the child will love her as she loves him. Skeetah fights for the survival of first China's puppies and then China, the two as intertwined as lovers. And their father, a widower fighting to raise his family alone, goes from strong family leader to an injured, helpless man reliant on his children to take on his role for the protection of them all.

The layers in this story could be analyzed, the references to mythology traced, but frankly how many readers really want to? Never mind all that; leave it to the professors to note the themes of love, water, blood and violence and tie them up neatly. The story is urgent. The characters burrow themselves under your skin. Then comes Katrina, the off-stage character waiting three quarters of the book to make her appearance. Teeth bared and sharpened, She furiously slams down Her fist as they huddle together, realizing with growing horror She is no Camille.

The final quarter of the novel is a nerve-wracking race to the finish, life vs. death, Katrina the god orchestrating the maelstrom. The water rises, the wind howls and ultimately it's up to Skeetah - most clairvoyant of them all - to make the decision that will save or undo them.

And the writing is gorgeous:

"It is terrible. It is the flailing wing that lashes like an extension cord used as a beating belt. It is the rain, which stings like stones, which drives into our eyes and bids them shut. It is the water, swirling and gathering and spreading on all sides, brown with an undercurrent of red to it, the clay of the Pit like a cut that won't stop leaking. It is the remains of the yard, the refrigerators and lawn mowers and the RV and mattresses, floating like a fleet. It is trees and branching breaking, popping like Black Cat firecrackers in an endless crackle of explosions, over and over and again and again. It is us huddling together on the roof, shaking against the plastic. It is everywhere. Daddy kneels behind us, tries to gather all of us to him. Skeetah hugs China, and she howls. Daddy's truck careens slowly in the yard."

So much talent in such a young writer. So much to look forward to.

Rarely can nausea be a good thing. In the case of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, it was. I was moved to queasiness by the captivating and expressive language she used to portray events that are inarguably not beautiful. One of these has stuck with me and utterly changed the way I view birth and motherhood.
In the opening pages of the novel, a ferocious white pit bull is giving birth to her first litter of puppies. She is described with all ferocity and razor teeth until she actually pushes a puppy out, at which point she is described as “blooming.” I actually had to catch my breath. Never before had I considered birth to be something beautiful. If asked, I would never have thought it a good idea to interject such a poised, elegant metaphor into such a gory situation. I was absolutely proved wrong.
To that same point, Ward empowers her fourteen-year-old narrator Esch with an exceptional imagination and ability to convey her complicated and endlessly interesting thoughts. She endows her with the ability to observe herself from the inside and the outside simultaneously. In tone alone, Ward creates a narrator that’s far beyond her years, without having to specifically mention it to the reader. I have listened to some discussions about whether Ward’s tone is too advanced for a fourteen-year-old and whether the obvious elevation of language creates the two separate, and thus confusing, voices of Esch and Ward herself. In my reading at least, I was never confused about who was saying what. The whole novel is in first person and, perhaps naively, that makes the accept Esch’s voice as the dominant, perhaps only, one. Ward has created this character and it feels like an imposition on my part to assert one way or the other about Esch’s intelligence or her ability to think the way she does.
Using a fourteen-year-old, War also tackles some pretty interesting questions about motherhood and family structure. She creates a complex dynamic in which Esch is growing up without a mother, becoming a mother, with only a dog (that bitterly dislikes her) as a current role model for motherhood. Esch is also among all men, which complicates her situation even further.
However, I will say that one of my favorite moments in the book deals with the “boys club” question and occurs at the end and involves the lovable Big Henry. Once everyone knows Esch is pregnant, Big Henry asks who the father is, and Esch (with potentially clichéd stoicism) responds, “It don’t have a daddy.” Big Henry first replies, “You wrong” and adds, “This baby got plenty daddies.” Thus, the family structure that limited Esch’s ability to deal with her road to motherhood actually becomes a positive and the idea of fatherhood and two-person parenting is reintroduced into the narrative.

Hmmm. How to describe this book... This is a story of four siblings, Esch, Randall, Skeetah, and Junior, living in coastal Mississippi during the days immediately preceding hurricane Katrina and a few days after. The book spans about 12 days. The father figure in the story is pretty distant and removed from his children. Skeetah has a prized pit bull named China who is having puppies when the story opens, and 15 year old Esch has just found out that she is pregnant. There are some pretty disturbing themes in this book that I won't mention but this story is very well written. I really enjoyed this. Once I started this book, I couldn't put it down.

This story set in a poor rural area along the coast of Mississippi takes place over a 12-day period that includes those leading up to, during, and after Hurricane Katrina hits, is about an impoverished family of four children and their father, Claude Batiste. The only daughter, a smart though sexually promiscuous 15-year-old girl named Esch, is in love with a 19-year-old named Manny (p 5), "Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly." His only use for her is as a sexual object, after one such encounter, she states (p 145), "Inside my chest, a machete swings, back and forth, up and down, breaking the living, clearing a pulpy path behind it where green things lie, leaking."

Her brothers are Randall, 17, Claude "Junior," 7, and Jason "Skeetah," 16, owner and protector of a pregnant Pit Bull named China (who births a litter of puppies near the start the story) who he loves as much as a parent does his child. Their father believes that the forecasted hurricane that's coming their way is going to be big, so enlists the help of his children to prepare for the worst. .

Although Esch's promiscuity is disconcerting and the description of events involving China (fighting and the puppies' birth) graphic, the writing, character development and plotting make for a powerful story. Ms. Ward's description of what Katrina wrought (p 255), "She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes," is an excellent example. Those who dare to read it are in for an interesting, original, unconventional ride. On similar subjects: Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger, and Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward is nothing short of spellbinding, in both prose and story content. On the surface, Ward’s award-winning novel is a simple tale chronicling the life of one poor black family in the ten days leading up to the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. And yet, the narrative, told by a fourteen-year-old girl named Esch, does so much more than that; it deals with complex themes of motherhood, growing up, feminism, etc.

I felt like I was taken on a rollercoaster ride of emotions with this book. In the beginning, I almost had to put it down during the graphic birth of the puppies; I had a similar reaction when China, Skeetah’s bullfighter, mauls her own pup, and again during Ward’s description of the dog fight scene. Beyond the more visually graphic scenes, this novel also managed to punch me in the gut and break my heart with its emotional intensity. When I feel such an emotional attachment to fictional characters that I physically and emotionally respond to novels, that’s when I know I have read something extraordinary. With Ward’s Salvage the Bones, I’ve definitely read something extraordinary.

Before even discussing its thematic complexities, I think this novel ought to be praised for its achievements in crafting a lyrical prose that allows the pages to just zip by. Jesmyn Ward considers herself a poet, and it shows in the way she writes this novel. She has a way of stringing words together in entirely original sequences that convey the beauty, or pain, or sadness in their meaning. When she vividly describes the texture and color of a man’s arm, the pressures of a new pregnancy, or the horrific sight of floodwater rising through the floorboards of what used to be a living room, Jesmyn Ward catches the scene in that instant and brings it to life with language that feels carefully crafted and yet unrestrained at the same time.

SPOILER AHEAD: One of the central themes explored in this novel is the idea of motherhood. As a motherless teenage girl who has recently learned of her pregnancy by Manny, a boy who refuses to take responsibility for his unborn son, Esch struggles to come to terms with her blossoming motherhood. Her experience is paralleled with China’s, who has her own pregnancy and delivery within the first few pages of the book, and continues to act as both a nurturing and destructive mother throughout the novel. Even Hurricane Katrina can be read as a manifestation of Mother Nature and her ability to give or destroy. All of these mother figures guide Esch on her way to discovering and coming to terms with her own motherhood. This theme, along with many others, drives the narrative forward and kept me engrossed in the book the whole time.

Overall, Salvage the Bones is one of the most memorable books I’ve read in 2015 (and trust me, I’ve read a LOT). I recommend it to anyone looking for a deep read dealing with adolescence, gender, race, and class - and probably a good cry.

Esch is a fourteen year old girl in a small town in Louisiana on property known as "The Pit". Since her mother died giving birth to the last son, Esch is the only female in this family of boys, with the exception of her brother Skeetah's prized pit bull, China. The twelve chapters of this book cover the twelve days leading to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. Esch's father, an alcoholic long past caring about much in the world, is concerned about the impending storm that everyone else believes will blow over like the others. He tries to take charge and have everyone board up the buildings on their property and stockpile the food they have little money for. But every family member has other issues to distract them: Esch has discovered she is pregnant, Skeetah has a new litter of China's puppies to deal with, older brother Randall has his basketball dreams that he hopes will take him out of "The Pit", and baby Junior is on a search for the parenting he missed out on when their mother died.

I know that seems like a lot, but I promise you that I haven't even touched the surface of this book and what happens during those twelve days. The plot has its ebbs and flows, but reading it with a book group allowed me to see things I would have missed during what seems to be the slower parts of the book. Salvage the Bones was definitely deserving of the awards and accolades that it received last year.

Salvage the Bones follows the simple yet complicated life of fifteen-year-old Esch, her three brothers Randall, Skeetah, and Junior, and their father in the coastal town of Bois Savage, Mississippi. The year is 2005, and Hurricane Katrina steadily approaches. Numerous struggles swirl around the family as well: Esch has just discovered she is pregnant, Skeetah is becoming more involved in the dangerous world of dogfighting, and everyone is hungry. Jesmyn Ward’s novel is an incredibly raw and emotional story about love and disaster, a literary journey I tremendously enjoyed.

The unconditional love a family has for its members is stressed again and again in this novel. Through countless scenes that test the family’s loyalty for one another and that showcase their natural inclination to shoulder each other’s burdens, strength of their bond is obvious. Even though there are conflicts within the novel’s star family, like in any family, when times get tough they stick together.

Ward manages to focus her novel on one misfit family, while also incorporating the terrors and implications of Hurricane Katrina. Throughout most of the novel there is a looming threat of the storm—what it will bring with it and what its consequences will be. Even though the hurricane, for most the part, seems like a slight concern for the characters, readers have the foresight of knowing the true horrors of the storm. Readers can only wait in suspense to see how the characters handle what is inevitably coming their way. Near the end of the novel, Ward pays homage to the kindness of the community who had to clean up the mess Katrina made. The technique of including Hurricane Katrina into the narrative gives Salvage the Bones a much greater historical and emotional impact. Ward comments on both an intimate and grand scale.

The descriptions throughout the novel are poetic, intricate, and beautiful. For example, “There is a movement behind my breast that feels like someone has turned on a hose full blast, and the water that has been baking in the pump in the summer heat floods out, scalding. This is love, and it hurts.” At times I was uncomfortable by just how visceral some of the scenes and descriptions are. I believe this speaks to Ward’s talent as a writer. Her metaphors, similes, and word choice seem so spot on that it can be difficult to separate yourself from what is happening to the characters. There is beauty in all of the pain the characters experience, pain that will hopeful be useful to them someday.

In short, this is a gorgeous, intense novel. Highly recommended.

In Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward gives no quarter in forcing the reader to live and feel the "lives and times" of a coastal family and their extended community immediately preceding the apocalyptic Hurricane Katrina. Through this, Jesmyn forces us to see the window to our shared future we all must survive. Regardless! Sleep was the only tolerable interruption in a non-stop "read" of this incomparable vision.

Knowing that "Salvage The Bones" is set in the twelve days preceding Hurricane Katrina, I spent nearly the entire novel being afraid for the Batiste family, knowing what the storm would bring and being fearful for them that they did not.

This is the story of a motherless family in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, the mother having died after giving birth to the youngest son, Junior. Esch, the sole female in the family, is the narrator. She is a strong girl, having to be as a result of her angry, alcoholic father, and so many brothers (Randall, Skeetah, and Junior).

I really can't find a way to adequately summarize this novel without revealing any spoilers, because I want to discuss it all. There is so much that makes more of an impression if the reader discovers it on their own. The novel is beautifully written, and the dialogue is spot on.

SALVAGE THE BONES focuses on an impoverished, rural black family in Mississippi as Hurricane Katrina approaches. The characterizations of the family members are so gritty and real that you really get to know them and feel as though you’re viewing life through their eyes. My only regret is that the story ended when it seemed as though there was so much more story to tell.

Set in a town called Bois Sauvage, Missippi Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award winning novel "Salvage the Bones" (2011), tells the story of a poor African American family in August, 2005, in the days surrounding Hurricane Katrina. The novel describes in detail African American life in a small Mississippi town early in the 21st Century and the harsh existence of a motherless family struggling to get by.

A young girl, Esch Batiste, 15, narrates the story. Esch lives with her father, and three brothers, Randall, 17, Skeetah, 16, and Junior 7. The mother of the family died giving birth to Junior, and Esch has assumed de facto mothering duties for the boy. The mother's death also casts a pall on the family and the story. The father, Claude, has largely withdrawn into drink following the death of his wife. Randall dreams of earning a scholarship and playing college basketball. Skeetah is deeply attached to his pet pit bull, China. And Skeetah, an intelligent, quiet impressionistic adolescent girl, is absorbed by her high school study of Greek mythology, particularly the stories of Medea, Jason, and the Argonauts.

The story begins 10 days before Hurricane Katrina devastates Bois Sauvage, reaches its climax during the day of Katrina, and ends in the day following the destruction. During this short time, Ward describes places, events, and people slowly and in detail. Ward creates palpable tension in the days leading up to Katrina and skillfully integrates the turbulent events in the lives of the Batistes with the large world of the storm.

The family has been dispirited and separated since the mother's death, as each of its members work to overcome their isolation and come together again. The stories of the siblings and their father are interrelated throughout the book. Young Esch has been having sexual relations since the age of 12. At the beginning of the novel, she finds herself pregnant by a family friend, Manny, who is living with another young woman. At many points in the story, Esch compares her own apparently abandoned situation, with the jealousy and passion of Medea in the Greek myth. At one point, feeling abandoned and alone, she refers to her unborn baby as a "black Athena", a reference to the Greek myth of the goddess who sprung full-grown from the head of Zeus. Esch tells her story in light of two other pregancies in addition to the passions of the Greek myth: the pregnancy of her mother with resulted in death, and the pregnancy of Skeetah's dog.

The strongest emotional relationship in the book is between Skeetah and his dog, China, who has just given birth. Skeetah's entire emotional life centers around the dog, and he cares for her responsibly and totally. However, much of the story involves dog fighting which the young boys of the town engage in illegally in the woods. For all her docility with Skeetah, China is ferocious in the sordid dog fighting ring. In addition to the description of Katrina, Ward reaches a strong climax to her novel in her depiction of the barbarities of dog fighting.

Skeetah hopes to sell China's pups to earn money for Randall to pursue his basketball. During the days leading up to Katrina, Randall's high school team is scheduled to play a game that will determine the team member who receives a scholarship to a prestigious basketball camp. Randall's hopes for the prize become emeshed in complications resulting from his sister's pregnancy and from Skeetah and his care for his dog.

Ward describes the ferocity of Katrina with great power and immediacy. The Batiste family members, caught in their own lives, must haltingly try to come together as a family to survive. Following the storm, the family and the community of Bois Sauvage must "salvage the bones" as they attempt to build a new life.

Ward has written a lyrical, dense novel with a dark theme and with the light of hope. It is a worthy book to read and to be honored with the National Book Award. Readers with a passion for the literature of the American South will love this novel.

Robin Friedman

This is a story about a poor family in Mississippi who lost their mother when she gave birth to their youngest member, Junior. Day to day existence is a struggle and even more so when Hurricane Katrina is forecast and the father immediately starts preparations to defy its power. In the meantime Esch has just discovered she is pregnant and Skeetah has bred his pit bull, China, and is now caring for her litter of puppies. SPOILER ALERT! Life is tough - the father loses several fingers in an accident; there is an organised dog-fight of incredible ferocity, Esch is rejected by the father of her child and the hurricane arrives in all its deadly intensity.

But ... this is a novel of love and hope - Skeetah's for his pit bull, the overbearing but ultimately sympathetic father for his dead wife and his children and the siblings who look out for each other at all times.

First class writing and a powerful story.

About this wrenching novel whose beauty clinched the National Book Award, that hasn't been said by critics and fellow reviews alike outside of receiving on the of highest honors for it? Not only was it an underdog, the characters in it were as well and the poor protagonist especially who is with her family just as the devastating Hurricane Katrina heads their way and they are unprepared - to give birth, to fight it out - but always prepared for another day of struggle. Their humanity in this horrific situation shines in spite of their decisions. People have complained about the slow pace of this novel but I liked most that it is very much like a hurricane in that it starts off slow, then BAM!!! Destroys every idea you had about how life in this society works for the underclass. If I weren't so traumatized I would read it again, but I definitely will just to enjoy the poetry of the sentences again. Outstanding.

My goodness, I was captured from the 1st page.
Esch's predicament, although extreme, is that of many teenage girls: in love but the object of that love has no interest. Classic...
The almost feral lifestyle of the children: taking care of themselves, no parenting from their drunk father was beautifully and tragically projected onto the written page.
Her brother's tenderness for the pitbull China and their remembrances of tenderness from their long dead mom was touching.....
The severity of the poverty, the hopelessness, Esch's intelligence thwarted by accidental promiscuity is haunting...
Some reviewers gave fewer stars because of the bleakness and the sex. The author did what many try to do: she made you FEEL. I'm giving her the max. I can't hate on her for bringing the book alive.

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward is a powerful portrayal of personal drama and tragedy, yet this surface-level description does not even begin to detail the impact and importance the novel holds. As we as readers follow fifteen-year old, pregnant Esch and her three brothers—Randall, Sketch, and Junior—as well as their somewhat emotionally distant father, we watch them prepare for Hurricane Katrina. But we watch more than the preparation for a natural disaster; we watch a family torn apart and pieced together. Everyone is hungry, literally and figuratively. This novel by Ward is an account of raw, unalloyed familial love and disheartening disaster. And through the lens of literature, we watch these survivors live.

Unconditional love, loyalty, is valued above much else. When times get tough, they stick together—something contemporary families in today’s American culture are sometimes unfortunately unfamiliar with. Ward has managed to construct a novel about an infamous natural disaster and transform it into something that transcends this notion, a novel that is moreover about humanity than the hurricane. The historical context gives the narrative weight, but what shifts the message into something wholly more meaningful is the way in which Ward writes. She focuses in on a family, giving her readers an intimate look into a large scale catastrophe.

Aside from the content, the prose itself is utterly beautiful, poetic. There is simply no way to read this novel at a distance, for the descriptions drive you into the heat of the moment, the heart of the family. In short, this is a novel that evokes emotion and forces the reader to feel. I applaud Ward for her poetic prose, parallels, metaphors of motherhood, and, ultimately, her talent as a fiction writer. If you are in search of an engrossing novel, pick this novel up and peel back the pages immediately. You will not regret it.

Three-fourths of the novel takes place in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, dragging out the slow-paced life of a poor, dysfunctional, motherless bayou family of four nearly feral children and their drunken, unemployed father. The oldest boy, Randall, hopes to make it to college through basketball; second son Skeetah is obsessed over his fighting pitbull bitch China, who just gave birth to a litter of pups that promises to make him a lot of money; 15-year-old daughter Esch is bright and loves to read, but so desperately craves love and attention that she willingly has sex with most of her brothers' friends and has convinced herself that "golden" Manny is the one she loves -- and when she figures out she is pregnant, she hopes he will love her too; and youngest son Junior is wildly out of control, curling up in the dirt under the house, tailing his older siblings, and trying to get close to the new pups. As the Hurricane bears down on them, their father ineptly tries to prepare the household while scheming to make a profit after it passes, but one disaster after another hits the hapless group.

What I thought would be the heart of the story, the category 5 hurricane, roars in and roars out, leaving so much devastation behind. But after all the excruciating detail leading up to it, the hurricane itself seems almost anti-climactic. The story is really about the family and not about the hurricane. And the prurient, almost celebratory details about dog-fighting are very off-putting.

I kept comparing this book to "Their Eyes Were Watching God," and in almost every aspect, "Salvage the Bones" falls short. "Salvage the Bones" was okay, but none of the characters ever captured my heart.

I don't know what to think of this book & there were times when I felt the story was slow moving. It was depressing but very, very well written. The story surrounds motherless siblings with a drunk for a father living in poverty stricken Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Their bleak life touches on many facets of rural poverty, teen pregnancy, dog fighting and more. You meet the family as they are preparing for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina. Katrina doesn't arrive until the last two chapters of the book. However, when Katrina arrives the author goes into overdrive and pulls the reader into the eye of the storm. The vivid descriptions and words leap from the pages and touches your heart. You get a sense of what life was like for this family day to day and after Katrina. Overall, the story revealed the power of a family's strength and love.

My rating 3.5 to 4 stars

Salvage the Bones may be Jesmyn Ward's first novel, but what a novel.

Each character is as alive as any ever put to a page, from the dog, China, and her dog fights, to the father, and his inability to cope as a widowed father of four. It's not a pretty story filled with flowers and perfumes, but a story of poverty and strength, hope and love, climaxing as the winds and waters of Katrina send the family into the swirling waters and howling winds to find their own salvation from the storm.

Just like it seemed to all of those who survived the Storm, the days leading up to it were bigger than life, filled with the little things that made life normal as well as preparation for the storm's arrival. Just like reality, no one expected Katrina to deliver the blow it did. From Esch's pregnancy, their father's accident, the dog China and her pups, and the tragedy of youth, each character colors the tale and brings it to life.

No one knew when the storm came that it was going to have the raw power it possessed. Caught in the attic, the storm surge rising, the reality of potentially drowning in their own attic grasps their attention, and in a desperate bid to find safety, a hole is smashed through the roof, and their escape is plotted. It's not without risk, and it comes with loss, but the family all make it to their temporary haven.

It's a powerful story,but its not a pretty story. It ends in the chaos and confusion of the first post-storm days after Katrina, with food and water in desperate shortage and yet it finds the grace and beauty that the best of humanity possesses. It has a real-ness about it that is rare, and the book is one of the best reads I've had in a long time.

I highly recommend it.

Salvage the Bones quickly drew me in at page 1, but as I read about this large Mississippi family with an alcoholic father, no mother or grandparents, I felt they lacked a moral core. Having nothing, when they needed something, they did what they had to do to get it. The only reference to schooling is the upcoming basketball camp, as well as Esch's many allusions to Medea and other characters in the Greek Mythology book she is reading. Salvage is a tough read with explicit sex and violent descriptions of dog fights. Yet there is no question about the family's love for each other, pulling together to prepare for Katrina and being together afterward with nothing left but each other and the hope that China, the dog, will return.

Jesmyn Ward's descriptions trigger strong emotions, building as the storm is building, right up to the last chapter which I finished with a deep sense of the devastation Katrina left behind, yet the hope the family had. Gritty with impact! I vocalized a "Wow!" and do look forward to reading her memoir coming out this year.

Jesmyn Ward’s, "Salvage the Bones" is an excellently written piece, portraying the "coming-of-age" story of a young black girl, named Esch, who lives in a poor, bayou town in Mississippi. Her single alcoholic father supports the family by doing odd jobs. Her mother died while giving birth to her youngest brother, and so she has grown up without a mother as the only girl in the family. The story portrays an interesting dynamic between Esch and her brothers, who are typically spending time together in the woods hanging out. The story becomes complicated, however, when Esch discovers that she is pregnant by Manny, one of her brother’s friends. Manny is unreceptive, and even violent to this idea, and so Esch attempts to keep the symptoms of her pregnancy a secret throughout this text. A very interesting tension is thus created, and we experience the chaotic world that Esch finds herself living in.
The text itself expands over twelve days before the hit of Hurricane Katrina. The kids find themselves around the woods, swimming, stealing and even dog fighting, while her father finds himself busily preparing the house for the upcoming storm. Although we only receive twelve days of description, we receive a full portrayal of the life of this family.
Esch does not have a mother figure in her life, thus leading her down a path of confusion as to what she should do with her pregnancy. The only mother figure she has in her life is unconventionally, her brother’s dog China, who has just given birth. Her brother hopes to sell China’s puppies to make money. Esch, however, has to witness the treatment of China’s pregnancy as well as the treatment of her puppies as a possible outcome of her own pregnancy. This idea is complicated even more when Manny is violent himself with Esch. This chaotic environment forces Esch to assumed adulthood at a much faster pace than usual.
One of the greatest aspects of this text is its figurative language. Ward’s text is riddled with metaphor and simile, leading to the poetic portrayal of Esch's experience. Esch herself is fascinated with literature, and so as she writes her own story with the tendency to use flowerly language and analogy. What is produced, however, is a beautiful depiction of the complicated life of a young black woman facing the inevitable fact of her pregnancy. Ward has succeeded with this one- I highly recommend to all.

This is the story of a family in Mississippi, a family who struggles daily, and their preparations for Hurricane Katrina. Esch, the fifteen-year-old female narrator, has three brothers and so desperately seeks male approval (and the avoidance of disapproval) she discovers she's pregnant after a few encounters with her brothers friend. Their mother is deceased and their father is an alcoholic. The four kids are largely on their own, but their father does start preparations for the Hurricane. His preparations, of course, are meager in the face of Category 5 Katrina.

Family, loyalty, dog fighting, struggle and survival and strength. And poetry. The story is written with wonderful metaphors so the reader sees and experiences everything along with Esch. Definitely worth reading (and underlining passages)!

Jesmyn Ward's novel works wonders as she articulates the deli ate relations between family, loss, and recovery. Her characters come alive off of the pages, it is hard to look away from them. Most notably, her lived experience through Hurricane Katrina gives her novel the depth and understanding it would take to understand such a complex and emotional experience.

-SPOILERS AHEAD, READER BE WARNED-

From an analytical perspective, she includes many different instances of metaphor and metonymy, connecting her narrator Esch with ancient Greek mythology of Jason and Madea. Esch is the only daughter among brothers, and her mother died giving birth to her youngest brother. The connection between Skeet’s pitbull and Esch herself is undeniable. The novel opens with the pitbull giving birth for the first time, and it is not long before we discover that Esch, too, is pregnant. The place of women in the novel is troubling and sometimes upsetting, and for me (personally) I struggled with the portrayal of Esch and I wished so badly that she would take authority rather than following her brothers around, or letting Manny have sex with her in the back woods. I loved the novel and rooted for Esch the entire time, but it was hard to watch her be thrown around by the male characters, both figuratively and literally.

The entirety of the novel mostly revolves around Esch, her brothers, and her brothers’ friends experience in the days leading up to hurricane Katrina. Ward does a phenomenal job making us forget that Katrina is even on the move—the storm is mentioned constantly but is always brushed off by the characters as not to be worried about. For a few chapters there, we almost believe their predictions that the hurricane will pass over and all will be well. Jesmyn does a spectacular job putting us in the positions of the characters and making us feel as though we, too, are just going about our days at the Pit. There is only one chapter concerning the storm. It is a difficult chapter to read, and it is visceral in the way it handles the imagery, sounds, feelings, of a hurricane. I cam inclined to believe what I am reading because I know that Jesmyn herself lived through Katrina.
The book is beautifully written. I can tell that Jesmyn is a poet. I read this book for a university English course, and it blew me away. Her imagery, her poetry, the way she paints the pictures of what we are to see took my breath away. I consider myself to be a hypercritical reader, but Jesmyn has my utmost respect. I will be most definitely watching for her next works in the years to come.

It reads like a poem so that style is not for everyone. It's a moment in time for a black family living in an impoverished parish when Katrina. But it's much more than that. You're sucked in to the struggles and feelings swarming around the characters becoming adults.

I found this story to be beautiful and heartbreaking.

While the hurricane is a small piece of the story it works as both a character and a setting for the entire struggle. I really liked the contrast between the knowing and the not knowing (for example, in hindsight we know what happened during Katrina).

The story was intriguing and well written the descriptions - even about the dog fights - and the characters are memorable the whole way through.

I absolutely loved this book. The imagery was powerful, and haunting at times. There is little dialogue in the book, but when the author can still make you love or hate some of its characters, you know you're holding a gem. I truly enjoyed this from start to finish. Unfortunately, there seem to be a lot of disgruntled readers who were expecting this book to be an in-depth story about Hurricane Katrina, which it isn't, but I enjoyed that the story focused more on the dynamics of a poor family in Mississippi who was struck by tragedy and destruction before the hurricane ever hit.

This was a really great book. I am an avid hater of anything even related to dog fighting so I debated getting this book at all. That said, the dog fighting parts were well written and as a dog lover, I related to the love Skeetah showed his pit. This book is heartbreaking - it's hard to believe that there is such poverty in the richest country in the world. The way these kids grew up was tough, but they'll make it. And while Katrina doesn't play a huge role in the novel, you know she's coming. This book is really good - give it a read, you'll be glad you did. And it makes me want to read more of the author's books; she's that good a writer.

Like the pit bull China that is featured so prominantly in this book, Jesmyn Ward's second novel grabs hold of your throat and doesn't let go. Told by a teenage age African American girl, her family lives in one of the poorer sections of rural Mississippi, and directly in the path of Hurricane Katrina. She tells of her bother Skeet, and his unfailing love for his brutal dog and her new born pups, her eldest brother Randall, trying desperately to escape the strangling holds of poverty and break into a new life through basketball, and mostly, her burning, unflinching yearning towards Manny, her brother Randall's friend, and the father of her unborn child. Beautiful, poetic writing graces these pages, such as this passage describing her brother and a group of boys playing basketball:

I rarely like first person narratives but this one pulled me in right away. I felt everything Esch felt and followed her feelings from the internal pain of love to the external devastation of hurricane Katrina.

In Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward has deftly crafted an engrossing family story. Reading this novel is like being in the Mississippi Coastal backwoods with Esch and her family. Through the excellent characterizations, the intimate details of their lives come alive, and I so felt like an intruder. I admired how the characters, including China the dog, approached each day with a fierceness of spirit and dignity despite all of the curveballs life was throwing at them. The story is told in twelve chapters over the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, and the pacing and tone of the story matches the increasing intensity in the family lives to the increasing intensity of Hurricane Katrina. I highly recommend this story of love, pain, youth, poverty, and resilience. Their world is not perfect, but it is this imperfection that makes them survivors. Though the author's lyrical language and masterful storytelling skills, an often invisible way of life is brought to light touching our souls and humanity.

If you are looking for an evocative read, lyrical and immersive and atmospheric, at times heartwrenching and at others, frustrating, then pick this up. Exceptional work on Ms. Ward's part. The writing is beautiful and lyric, with some sentences being straight poetry (rhymed verse in one case, whether intentional or not). I had heard good things but I didn't expect to be so drawn in. Finished it in two days.

This is not a bad book. It’s also not a great book. It has all the characteristics of writing done out of a mfa writing program. Most obvious among these is an endless use of imagery, some of it very good, some of it off the mark, but in any case too much of it. Jesmyn Ward, in my opinion, would write better if she wrote a little less. What there is of plot ends up taking a back seat, and feels a bit stiff. Admittedly, the concept of chronicling events over a limited sequence of several days in the lives of children/young adults might produce more atmosphere than plot, and to me the atmosphere of place was the best thing in this novel. But here the characters themselves are a bit weak. One loves his dog (a female fighting pit-bull whose portrait the author never tires if redrawing, I must have seen that dog’s tongue two hundred times), another loves b-ball, a third is too little to do more than cling (literally) to his siblings. The girl’s lover is simply a fiend (even she knows it, which ends up feeling unintentionally comical). The nice-guy friend is a bit slow and inept. Weakest is the father, a non-entity, too much so even if his shortcomings as parent are the point. But I also didn’t wholly understand the main character. It is a fifteen year-old girl observing the world in strings of images like a graduate student in a writing program. I can’t fathom why neither the author nor anybody else along the way felt this is ridiculous. Not to mention that no girl that age would talk like she does about sex. But I guess in writing programs ‘writing’ trumps common sense, and this is what you get.
ps- I also didn't get why the first half of the (weak, I thought) final chapter shifts to the past tense. That bit of mfa writing technique passed right by me.

Novelists like Jesmyn Ward don't come along very often. Only truly special writers can slip readers beneath the skin of a character, make them feel as if they are experiencing the events happening on page first hand. Reading Salvage the Bones one is drawn into the oppressive summer heat of Louisiana; aches with helpless desire; is burdened by a stifling sense of loss; vicariously goes through youthful yearning to be loved, even if only as much as a treasured pet. Prior to the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, the pace of the narrative is slow and steady. We wait for the inevitable devastation to arrive, knowing far more about what is to come than the family we're observing up close. A motherless girl lets the local boys take what they please from her until she meets one from who she wants something back. She is a lone woman in a world of men, and it is through her eyes that we pass idle time waiting, watching, remembering, wishing for what is plain will not be, settling for whatever she is able to grab hold of. This girl does not get placed on a pedestal like her brother's prized dog, but like China she is able to nurture when called upon, ready to fight tooth and nail for survival when necessary. Read this book. Then join me in the wait for Jesmyn Ward's next one.

Remember Hurricane Katrina that hit the south east coast of the US in August 2005? This became the most expensive natural disaster in US history. Virtually all the media coverage we saw of this event was focused on New Orleans: the apparent lack of preparation, the flooded streets, floating corpses, the inability of the city to cope afterwards, the President's apparent lack of interest - I am sure you remember. But what we never really saw or heard about was the devastation in neighbouring states and communities. Especially Mississippi. This state was the hardest hit by the hurricane, with all areas suffering widespread damage. 235 people died, most of them in the coastal areas, which is also where the greatest damage and destruction occurred. In common with New Orleans and those images forever imprinted on our minds, is that it was the poorest who suffered the most. Mississippi, along with Louisiana and neighbouring Alabama are among the poorest states in the country. The effects of such a disaster are going to be much greater on the poorest than on others.

Such a family lives in the fictional Mississippi coastal town of Bois Sauvauge. Four motherless children left largely to bring themselves up: 17 year old Randall - way older than his years; 16 year old Skeeter who lives only for his fighter dog China in whom he sees the source of financial salvation for the family; 14 year old Esch, pregnant and desperately trying to deny it; and 7 year old Junior, who never knew his mother and is almost feral. Their father has never gotten over the death of his wife, and tries his absolute best to parent and provide for his children, but the family's hand to mouth existence makes this an almost impossible task.

Beginning twelve days before Hurricane Katrina strikes, Esch narrates the family's attempts to prepare for the storm which they know is going to be bigger than anything else they have had to deal with. The children try to stock pile food, their father works on getting bottles filled with water, and on ways to protect the house and shed, Skeeter proves to be a better mother to China and her pups than China is herself. Esch loses herself in morning sickness, her mad crazy love for the teenage father of her baby, and having no mother looks to the sorceress Medea from Greek mythology for inspiration and direction.

Each chapter is one of the twelve days. At the core of each chapter is the ominous threat of the approaching storm, the exhausting heat and humidity, the dirt and dust the family lives in, the constant hunt for food. But also the enormous love andhige reliance these children have on each other for the survival of their precarious family unit. Their father is really a background figure simply because he is so powerless and ineffectual, plus he is often drunk. Their relationships with each other, and with their peers in the local community are what are what drives them - the rivalries, love affairs, the graphically violent but beautifully drawn dog fights, and Skeeter's utter devotion to the dog.

This book won the National Book Award 2011. Very inspirational, it is a marvellous story. It is raw, it is violent, there is little stability in these kids' lives, but above all they have each other. And that is a difficult thing to tear apart, something not even Hurricane Katrina has the power to do, although she has a damn good time trying.

It's a hard story to read, a tale of horrific poverty and monumental loss, but the evocative language that Ward uses is sublime. This will become part of the Canon of African American literature, like Beloved, but it is not strictly an African-American novel. It's just a fantastically rendered story of family and the strength of love within that blood bond. All the characters are individuals. They are solid, three dimensional and distinct. The setting is unique and well written and the plot is solid, with an actual action packed climax that is totally believable and fits perfectly with the rest of the story. Please, read this treasure.

This is a prose novel written by a poet. The language is beautiful and the pacing is perfect. It was difficult to put this one down at night, and sometimes I didn't. I wish it was longer. I hated to come to the last page and leave this family. I have read in some places that it is considered a Katrina novel; however, I think that would be an incorrect characterization of the book. It actually is about a poor family in Mississippi and how they live, and how they deal with the adversity and problems of life without money or a mother. The surviving parent is a neglectful alcoholic father. The children are raising themselves as a result, and the way they handle their problems fall somewhat short of success. They are not doing the best they can, but they are surviving each day despite the still fresh hurt of the mother's death in childbirth several years previously. They each turn to things which best get them through their days and distract them from emotional pain. At the same time, each recognizes the value of being part of a family and inconsistently have each other's back. When Katrina does hit, the author's talent shows the force of the hurricane easily with a poet's facility. This book is wonderful to read.

So many facets of these characters could lead right into stereotypes, but they are more complex, more human than stereotypes would allow. A powerful read that looks straight at the raw tenderness and exquisite suffering of life.

China is birthing puppies and people are battering down the hatches, expecting a big storm. Esch is feeling morning sickness, in the early stages of her pregnancy to one of the many boys she lays down with. Her brother, Skeetah, is preoccupied with China's pups and wellbeing. Esch's father is prone to drink since their Mama died giving birth to Junior, and fourteen-year-old Esch keeps looking at Manny out of the corner of her eye...

These are the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina - the days `before', when nobody was prepared for the destruction about to befall them all.

`Salvage the Bones' was the 2011 National Book Award winner by Jesmyn Ward.

Ward's novel is by no means a comfortable read. It's partly that there's a pervading sense of grim foreboding throughout the novel, as readers wade through the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. We know of the destruction to come, but as was the true-to-life case in 2005, the characters in `Salvage' have no foresight, and are utterly unprepared for the Hurricane that will kill 1,833 people and decimate areas already burdened by poverty. But the book is also uncomfortable because Ward puts those areas under a microscope - observing the rural poor, and examining the many ways that their lives were already shambolic before the Hurricane hit.

Esch, our narrator, is fourteen and pregnant. She's a bright young girl, who reads plenty and makes keen observations about her family and friends. But she is mother-less, and from a young age has sought comfort and gratification with local boys and her brother's friends. Her reactions and thoughts on `laying' with these boys are cringe-worthy for their innocence - when she thinks that she can't say no, because it's now expected of her. Or when she muses that she always thought local boy `Big Henry' (who is in his 20's) would one day come calling for her, like all the other boys, she's surprised that he hasn't already.

Esch's thoughts are disarming and horrifying, mostly because Ward presents them so calmly and with a matter-of-fact innocence that wrenches the heart. It's doubly heart-breaking because Esch is brilliant and intelligent, some of her observations are wonderfully perceptive.

It did take me a while to finish this book, because there is a lot of sadness to wade through. Not to mention a feeling of hopeless uselessness - as you read these people prepare for a storm that is going to rip their lives asunder. But I was surprised that as the story progressed there was a lot of heart to be found in Esch's family saga. There's a feeling that in the aftermath of Katrina this family, no matter their flaws, will band together and find each other in the rubble.

No wonder Ward won the prestigious `National Book Award' for `Salvage the Bones'. She writes a raw and honest portrayal of life before destruction - in an unflinching examination of what life is like for a good portion of the under-privileged population. Her words are disarmingly beautiful, and Esch is one character who stays with you long after the last page.

Salvage the Bones takes place over twelve days told in twelve chapters surrounding Hurricane Katrina. The main character, Esch is the only girl living in a family of rambunctious boys. Her mother died during childbirth and her father is an alcoholic stumbling through life and struggling to help his family survive. The family lives in a trailer home on the pit in Mississippi near the Gulf of Mexico. Esch is in high school and her summer homework entails reading Mythology by Edith Hamilton. As Esch narrates the story of her life with the hurricane knocking on her door, the Greek myth of Medea and Jason sail through the pages alongside her.

The Batiste family contains, Esch who is 14, pregnant by a man who doesn't care about her. Skeetah who owns a fighting pitbull named China whom he has pinned all his hopes on and loves like a sibling. Randall is Esch's oldest brother who is a great basketball player and has high hopes to play ball in college. Junior was the last child born to his mother and was raised by his siblings, Randall and Esch who cared for the child after their mother died. This is one family who has suffered through tragedy and endured. Their ability to love and endure through tragedy and triumph is so heartfelt and touching.

After I read the first chapter of Salvage the Bones, I realized this book is not for everyone. Some people will choose to give up on it and quit reading because of the dog fighting and the stark brutality of the story. I read through the pain and at the end survived with the reality that Salvage the Bones is one damn good book. Jesmyn Ward's beautiful metaphoric language is so gritty and poetic. Salvage the Bones hits you like a hurricane and throws you hard up against the wall. It is hard not to feel like you just survived the storm when you finish the book.

Salvage the Bones is based on the author's personal experience during Hurricane Katrina. Her family lives in a trailer home on the coast like Esch and her family and when the hurricane hit they had to escape their home due to the winds and flooding. They drove a mile down the road to the neighbors and according to an interview with The Guardian, Ward states, that the neighbor told them they had no room in their house and they had to wait out the hurricane in a nearby field.

In my opinion, Salvage the Bones is destined to be a book read in high school and college classrooms and will join the canon of great books by Southern Writers. Beware this book packs a mean punch. Ward reminds me of Flannery O'Connor.

Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award in 2011. Make no bones about it, this book is Amazing.

I loved many things about this book, and found it frustrating.

I loved what many reviewers praised: wonderful, sympathetic characters; an immersion into the land and their home; an unsentimental view of suffering; precise details that brought the place and characters to life; organic metaphors that grew out of the landscape, and so on.

What I found frustrating: first, the layered metaphors became a distraction. While they usually grew organically from the surroundings, they came too frequently for my taste. (These notes strictly reflect my taste, and, obviously, most readers did not find these points as bothersome.) Alice LaPlante in The Making of a Story: A Norton Guide to Creative Writing (page 121) says, "A good metaphor gives us a little shock: it stretches our imagination by forcing us to see something in a new light, yet it also immediately convinces us that it is true." When a metaphor gives us a little shock, it moves away from the immediate story into a broader dimension. This "moving away" carries a cost: leaving the immediate thrust of the text.

The references to the myth of Media (direct references drawn in the novel) provide another example of figurative language. LaPlante warns about symbols that come from on high, that do not grow organically from the narrative. She says that these symbols almost always make the author appear to be "trying too hard."

While Jesmyn Ward's colorful metaphors are often worth digressions, the amount of figurative language somewhat undermines the flow of the narrative. The frequency of the poetic language also weakens individual metaphors. LaPlante's little shocks become less shocking when they pile one on top of the other.

Jesmyn Ward's poetic approach also includes the point of view. The POV here is first person, and the voice of Esch stays highly observant, brainy and sensitive, yet sometimes moves toward the dialect of her family and friends. The voice did not hit many wrong notes, and it felt real to me.

So what did I find problematic in the point of view? Jesmyn Ward's use of present tense, along with first person makes the narration more poetic and less grounded (see a pattern emerging?). Poetry often uses first person which becomes stilted to my ear in a novel. Points of View: Revised Edition , discusses poetic voice: "Interior monologue [or first-person stream of consciousness] also thrives in poetry..., because rendering the ongoing inner life often demands extraordinary uses of language."

The text, the story, demands too much focus for Jesmyn Ward to allow the point of view to lapse into real interior monologue. Yet it almost becomes stream of consciousness at some points. For example, when Esch describes her mother dancing, shimmying, the character's voice interleaves those images with descriptions of China shimmying as a female animal (all in present tense). The descriptions alternate, sometimes sentence by sentence, between Esch's mother and China with one description flowing into another. Add Ward's metaphors and this section comes close to poetic interior monologue.

This poetic, present tense becomes an almost universal present, which has a cost: it seems slightly unnatural. Points of View gives examples of first-person, subjective narration, and all of those examples are written in the past tense. Why? From the first mutterings of language, humans sat after their nighttime meals and told their personal stories in past tense. Past tense seems more natural because it has such a long history, has become a norm, and implies reflection by the narrator. Present tense may bring immediacy, as in The Hunger Games , but its slight unnaturalness creates a dissonance for the reader.

Am I being a stickler? Consider the other ways that the reader is distanced from the story-line.

The third distancing attribute resides in the sentence structure. While narrators in stories are usually free to speak informal (and often ungrammatical) English, the basic suggestions for composition in The Elements of Style (4th Edition) are usually worth following. Elements of Style says to keep related words together in a sentence. For example, if a participle phrase modifies the subject, it should, almost always, directly precede the subject. Ward often ignores this principle and modifies the subject from the tail end of a long sentence. The reader must then puzzle for a second over the meaning. This extra bit of neuron activity is not really necessary. These neurons are not directly digesting and integrating the story, but rather have a very short interruption to parse the language.

Combine those short interruptions with the breaks for bundled metaphor and with the poetic voice of present tense and the reader spends unnecessary time parsing. I felt that following the story line of Savage the Bones took more concentration than following Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club),The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, or Tinkers (not lightweight books). (Tinkers has many shifts in character POV and many leaps in time, and I felt that it still flowed more smoothly.) I felt that the authors of those three books edited with more vigor.

In Salvage the Bones, the text -- the narrative, the setting, and the characters -- are fantastic. It is a shame to have too many extra-narrative devices that reach toward broader meaning or that interject subtext. Yes, Ward's metaphors are usually organic and telling, but less would be more. Yes, the present tense provides some immediacy (making the hot atmosphere seem oppressive), but is it worth unconscious dissonance for the reader?

Jesmyn Ward is a fantastic writer, and I believe she could make her stories stronger by showing more restraint and by editing with more fervor.

This was a weird book. It was good… but I’m not sure I liked it and I think it had a lot to do with the dogs (don’t read this if you are really sensitive about what happens to animals in books). I almost stopped reading a half dozen times, which is impressive for a book that doesn’t hit 300 pages. The writing is amazing. The plot was well put together. But what made this book so memorable were the characters and how they handled the situations they were thrust into

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Fifteen year old Esch just found she's pregnant. She keeps this secret to herself while watching her brother Skeetah take care of his prize dog-fighting pit bull China, who just had puppies. Her oldest brother Randall struggles to take care of the family while their alcoholic father tries to prepare for a coming hurricane. Their mother died giving birth to their youngest brother Junior and the family's life in rural Mississippi has been extra hard ever since.

This book was beautiful and raw, both uplifting and upsetting. It was a wonderful story about survival in the midst of poverty and adversity. Every character is really well-developed. I was both sympathetic to and frustrated with most of them at one time or the other. This novel is told in the first person by Esch and takes place over the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. As the storm grows closer, the tension builds. The descriptions are so vivid; it felt like I was there with them. I could not put this book down for the last two chapters as the storm grew closer.

I'm not the only who loved this book - it's a National Book Award Finalist for Fiction this year. (Winners will be announced November 16.)

SALVAGE THE BONES

Meet fourteen year old Esch Batiste, living in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, with her booze-loving daddy, and brothers Skeetah, Randall, and Junior. Living in an area of land called The Pit, Esch tells the story of their lives on the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina.

Esch's mom passed away years earlier, leaving Esch as the only woman in this group of brothers and her dad. Her dad, while loving, is distant with his kids having never fully recovered from loosing his wife. His best friend and companion is a bottle of booze. Always starting jobs and projects, full of good ideas and intentions, Daddy never seems to be able to accomplish or finish what he starts, unless it's a bottle. He's around, but he's pretty much an invisible parent, leaving his kids to fend for themselves.

Skeetah fights pit bulls. The love of his life is China, his wonder dog, who he treats as if she is human. China has just given birth to a litter of future fighters, puppies Skeetah plans on making some much needed cash from. He cherishes China and acts if she were a goddess, caring for her, stealing for her, worrying about her. Yet, she is a killer, an ominous and relentless fighter in the ring, much like a hurricane. She is a dog who is totally committed to Skeetah.

On the twelve days before Hurricane Katrina ravages the US, we are given an inside and up-front look into the world of the Batiste family. Esch is pregnant and trying to deal with this fact. She has been with her share of boys, quite a few for her tender age of fourteen, yet she knows who the daddy is. She is trying hard to cope with being pregnant, alone, and afraid. She also cares for her family, and her brothers are everything to her. They are a tight-knit family.

The writing is vivid and real. The characters are fleshed-out and unique. The language is the dialect of the South which makes the characters even more real and alive. The fighting scenes between China and other pits are chilling and descriptive, which may cause some readers discomfort.

The narrative during and after Hurricane Katrina put the reader smack dab in the middle of the storm, feeling the rain pelting your body, hearing the wind howl, seeing the land become an unforgiving ocean of dismay and despair. As the family fights for their lives and weathers the storm, the reader is also struggling to stay alive, battling against nature at her very worst, combating to make it through the storm and then hoping to be able to carry on afterwards in a ravaged land that shows no mercy. The Batiste family had few possessions and lost it all to Hurricane Katrina.

Esch is a character that this reader strongly admired. She has grit and gumption, emotions that run deep, and a love for her family that has no end. Poor, alone in dealing with her pregnancy, missing her mother, worrying about her brothers and daddy, Esch is brave, wise, and loving and a character I will remember for a long time.

The writing flowed, Ward is a hypnotic writer who grabs you by the hand and heart and doesn't let go even when you are finished with the book. For example -- "The hurricane laughed. A tree, plucked from its branches, hopped across the yard and landed against Daddy's truck with a crunch, stopped short like it had won a game of hopscotch without stepping out of the lines. The sky was so close I felt like I could reach up and bury my arm in it." Or -- "I think back to all the times I've had sex, and it seems like every memory has gold and silver condom wrappers, like chocolates covered in golden foil to look like coins, that the boys leave behind once they get up --."

If you want a book that keeps you enthralled, that makes you laugh, cry, takes you in the heart of a poverty-ridden but loving family, that picks you up and sets you in the middle of Hurricane Katrina, that leaves a mark on your heart and soul, then this is the book for you.

BRAVO! and KUDOS! to Jesmyn Ward. Thanks for a one in a million read.

Thank you --

Pam

Well written book. I was drawn into the characters. It was too depressing for me to recommend to friends. I’m sure there is truth in the kind of lives these foks lived, just too hard for me to relate to.

What an amazing, gripping story. This story tells of one family and the twelve days preceding Hurricane Katrina. This book has some really tough material. I couldn't help but feel sorry for the motherless Esch, 14 and pregnant, who just wanted her baby's father to love her. The dog fighting scenes were gruesome. Part of me wanted to close the book, but another part of me couldn't look away. Loved this book.

Tough subject matter... a 12 year old girl having sex, graphic dogfights, children adrift in poverty and rootlessness. However the style, while contrived and striving too hard to be down-homey, captivated me and I enjoyed it for the most part. The similes are overly plentiful and while some are wonderful, they often miss the mark. Oh, and by the way forsythia flowers are yellow, not blue.

The setting for this book gives way to it's dark and menacing storyline. It's about a 14 year old girl, Esch, that lives with her dad and 3 brothers in a small, Mississippi town. They are poor and preparing for a large hurricane off the Gulf, which turns out to be Katrina. Esch learns early on that she is pregnant and is dealing with hiding it from her family as well as what it means for her future. At the same time, her brother is taking care of his pit bull, who just had a litter of puppies, and alternating between caring for the puppies and preparing her for fighting. The fighting scenes, one between the men and another between dogs, are intense and ominous. This book is a great look at how hard it is growing up in poor Mississippi and the decisions kids have to make to stay alive and survive their surroundings.

This is the most depressing book I've read in months. I don't know, maybe the criteria of a "good" book is one that affects you one way or the other.

The time frame for the story is the days leading up to hurricane Katrina.

The story is told from the viewpoint of pregnant, fourteen year old Esch. Her father could best be described as indifferent. Her mother died giving birth to "junior" , now around five years old and most comfortable spending his time under the house. Brother Randall pins his hopes on a basketball scholarship. Skeetahs all-consuming passion is his pit bull, China , her puppies and dogfights. Case in point: when he is sent for hurricane supplies he comes back with a hundred pounds of dog food, canned peas and Top Ramen noodles.

A heart-wrenching , sad look at rural poverty and the survival of the human spirit.

And, yes, I gave it 5 stars, having read it in 2 days. Ward is one helluva writer. Death and destruction aren't my favorite topics, but nothing brought home the horrors wreaked by Hurricane Katrina like this telling of its story. To share other aspects of the pain in this book would spoil it -- but there's an awful lot of it. One could choose to consider the ending hopeful, but given the universe in which the story plays out, I find that a hard stretch. Each reader must make that decision for him/herself.

The book Salvage the Bones is set during Hurricane Katrina. This book is divided into eleven days. Throughout the eleven days the author describes the lifestyle of several lower class people. The author does a very great job in being very descriptive going deeply into detail; as if the readers were actually there experiencing everything first hand. The author makes it very easy for readers to get a mental picture of all the surroundings and every detail. Although the author is very descriptive, on several occasions she tends to describe things that might not help with the meaning that she is trying to get across. It can perhaps take away from the meaning she is going for in the first place. In the book, one of the main characters is Esch. Esch loses her mother at a young age; she has no mother figure to look up to when she is growing up. Esch finds out that she is pregnant with Manny's baby. She is in love with Manny but he only uses her for sexual relations. She does not tell anyone that she is pregnant although she thinks that Manny knows. Her father is a drunk who does not have much to do with her or her siblings. With Esch facing all these problems it helps keep readers on the edge of their seats to see what is going to happen next in the book. The author did a very great job when she was writing the book and how she set it up for the readers. Even though Hurricane Katrina was the main reason people read the book it only took a small amount up in the book. Once the reader begins this book it is very hard to put it down. This book has several cruel parts in it. It gets very physical when dealing with the animals. Salvage the Bones is not just about a Hurricane that devastated families it is about the struggles that a family faces with the days leading up to Katrina. Ward uses words that give readers a very good visual on what she talks about in the book. When she describes certain activities she is very bold and to the point. She shows love, pain, and even hate throughout the entire book. She does a very good job of letting readers get into the book by putting the characters into situations that teenagers will or perhaps are facing at the present day. Readers will relate to books better and read them if they can relate to what is going on in the books instead of having it set in old days where teenagers do not quite understand why things happen. In the book, Esch shows love and betrayal when she deals with her lover, Manny. A lot of teenagers can relate to this when they think that they love someone, but they do not seem to keep the attention of that person. All the events that happen throughout the book can in a way be related to by young teenage readers and could perhaps show readers what they will have to face in the near future. This was a very interesting book to read.

Salvage the Bones is an exhilarating novel by Mississippi writer, Jesmyn Ward, published by Bloomsbury USA, in 2011. Consisting of 258 pages, the novel is fairly brisk. Despite this, it is nothing short of a good read as Ward weaves the tale of a poor black family struggling to survive through the days before and during the time Hurricane Katrina hits their home located in coastal Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The city of Bois Sauvage is not unlike the city of Biloxi, Mississippi in sense of its placement on the coast and the types of people that live in it. Ward drives home a passionate tale, (particularly if one is from the South) that proves that family always comes first, no matter what.

Ward supports her story with a strong cast of characters that seem to pace the story well and keep readers, such as myself, engrossed. The tale's narrator, Esch is an important member of the cast of main characters and is the second oldest of her siblings. As narrator, many things are told through her eyes and with her thoughts included; one can easily get a view of her world. She is the only the only female of the home and as a result, fills roles her mother would have in order to help her family while still maintaining her youthful spirit. Despite this, she is hiding a big secret she goes to great lengths to keep in the dark. Esch has three brothers and they fill typical sibling roles. Skeetah is the oldest of the children and helps provide income for the family by fighting dogs. His most prized dog, China, is well known for her skill and Skeetah shares a special relationship with her that keeps her strong. Randall is third oldest and dreams of being a big basketball star one day in order to provide his family with the things they deserve. Due to his ambitious nature, he is easily angered. The last of the children is Junior. Junior is the youngest of the children and is often seen around Esch or Skeetah, who commonly babysit him. Junior is quite naïve due to his age, but wants to desperately help the family out to the point he occasionally becomes a nuisance. Despite this, he tries to remain strong. Unlike the rest of the children, Juinor has no recollection of his mother outside what stories the family tells of her to him. The final member of the house is the father. Despite his drunken fits of rage, he cares for his family and is focused on the hurricanes emerging from the Gulf of Mexico; spending his time boarding up the house. Salvage the Bones is filled with many different personalities that bloom with the amount of characters that appear. Some characters appear benign, while others shatter the façade and take on much darker positions, pushing each member of the family into their own personal storm as the looming threat of Hurricane Katrina nears.

The main characters reside an underprivileged and down-trodden area of the city that appears to be somewhat rural, though it does contain elements that push the place closer to an urban city. The setting easily fools readers into thinking the main characters are living in a time much earlier than stated with the family's central home illustrated to be nothing more than an old wooden home, built several years before even the father's birth perhaps. In one instance, one could just pull a board from it with relative ease. Ward does well in her descriptions describing the town, as she strings together a harsh place befitting survival of the fittest. Her figurative language is colorful and is often paired with dark, gritty situations, somehow making light of them despite the dark connotations they carry.

Salvage the Bones is not for the reader expecting a simple, light hearted read. The novel has a lot of power behind it and delves into a world where things are not easy to obtain, and anything worth having must be fought for. Ward's words are strong and have almost the power The Color Purple has at various points in the story. The sporadic jumps in strength behind her words kept me engrossed as I looked for the next big conflict as each wave of conflict battered the family like waves from the actual storm. I simply loved it. Ward makes sure that every character has an important role in shaping the family's fate and even the animals themselves provide roles comparable to the human cast. China, the family dog, is an example of this, with her likeness even being depicted on the novel's cover.

In all, I greatly enjoyed reading Salvage the Bones and I praise Ward's bravery to step up and tell her fictional tale in a way some may find stereotypical to race, but nevertheless happens. Though she portrays the characters in her style, it can still be seen as offensive to some degree due to the language, lifestyles, and ideals the characters have. Despite this, I do not see it any different than some more "classical writers" such as William Faulkner. In order to be told with such gravity, it forces us to embrace the stereotype and see the world through a girl without a role model. Violence is a common theme in this novel, with fighting and revenge becoming the most common way of coming to the root of many characters' reasons and ideals. Coming of age is also easily seen as a theme, with each of the children having to discover themselves and move forward with the impending threat. I particularly liked Skeetah for his solid determination and iron will to never give in and put his family first whether he knew it at the time or not. Salvage the Bones is a great book and I urge others to read it as well as it is a fantastic book.

Devron Cheaton
This novel is told by 15 year-old Esch is a poor, plain unlucky pregnant teenager. She now faces one of the biggest storms that they will probably get, and she cannot even tell her brothers nor father because she does not know what their actions are going to be. Her dad is a drunk and all that they have to eat at night is ramen noodles. She has it since her mom died when she was a young the only thing that she knew how to do was talk to boys about her situations. But she soon learned that it was not the right way because she soon got pregnant, and her boyfriend did not want to have anything to do with her anymore. While she was off with them, she would use nymphs and goddesses from Greek myths, she would pretend to be with Psyche, Eurydice, and Daphne. Jesmyn gives a very clear singular to her audience and she uses a lot of style.
The novel takes place in Bois Sauvage near Mississippi's gulf coast. This is not the first novel that she has written in this setting, she also wrote her very first novel at this same location which is where the line bleeds. This book was published in 2011 and published by Bloomsbury USA, New York.
Salvage the Bones is told by Esch who is desperately looking for love, but she cannot find love because she is looking for it in all the wrong places. Once she finds out that she is pregnant everything will really go downhill for her. The father of her soon to be baby does not want anything to do with her now that he finds out that she will soon have his baby. Esch is poetic and observant because she finds herself reminiscing about her childhood when her mother died when she was just a kid. She only uses ironic once, and that is when she talks about FEMA, there she does not clearly address the main issues of the neglect that actually made Katrina ironic. She set her 12 days before the hurricane Katrina and also after it. Each day will give us a brief story about of what she did day by day, everything from China having her puppies to her father finding out that she is pregnant. Esch older brothers (Skeetah, Junior, and Randall) steal for Esch and themselves while they sacrifice and brawl to get the things that matter the most.
Jesmyn had a poor character strive and she was trying to achieve her dreams so that they can somehow improve their lives. When it comes to suffering Salvage the Bones is in all the right places because this book will show you the true definition of a struggle. In the end, they will lose all the little things that they have and they will be in pain and sorrow. The book is really teaching you how to be patient and how to wait out storms even if they are the worst ones.

Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones depicts the lives of Esch and her family. They have experienced several cases of tragedy throughout the novel but always seem to overcome it. After reading the novel, I believe Jesmyn Ward did an excellent job describing their situations they encounter. She is an extremely vivid write providing infinite amounts of detail to support herself in her writing.
This novel is smartly plotted and provides the reader with the right amount of information. Each character has their own personality which helps the reader with the reader cling to one character and connect themselves with that character. Esch is a fifteen year old struggling to make it through each day. She struggles with her own secret that her father does not know anything about it. Young girls or moms can relate to her because they have all experienced a time where no one could know their secret. In her case, some may not have it experienced it, but they know a friend who struggled finding themselves. Skeetah keeps watch of his beloved pit-bull pup, China, throughout the novel. Junior and Randall live day by day trying to survive through the hurricane that is coming their way.
Will this family survive? Can they handle the struggles they are put through until the end? Esch and her family make it through it all. They may fight, but they love and care passionately for each other. This book is a good read. It shows life lessons, a family's love, and the struggle to survive.

Jesmyn Ward is a talented, insightful author. She tells an important story well. Her references (by Esch) to Greek Mythology make the story even more compelling. The story pulls you in and (at the same time)it is hard to read. It is difficult to read about this family's struggle yet it's important for everyone to know what it is like for families who live from day to day and how much more difficult it is when a catastrophic event happens to those with no resources.

Salvage the Bones is a novel about a poor rural black family living in a fictional town on the Gulf of Mexico. It's a tightly-knit clan, a tough father and 4 children whose mother died when the youngest was born and a community of friends and acquaintances all living in similar circumstances. So much struck me about this book and has stayed with me that I can't help but list a few:

The way that the boy Esch (the main character, who is obsessed with Greek mythology, particularly Medea)is in love with brushes her off when she needs him the most.
The way they care for China, the pit bull, and her puppies, when they are raising them to be fighting dogs. It's a strange anachronism.
The terror you feel for the family as Katrina bears down on them, knowing just how bad it'll get and hoping they make it.

It's gritty, to be sure. There is poverty, dog fighting, teenage pregnancy, death and loss described in this novel. But there is also the love of family, the support of community, and breathtakingly beautiful writing that carries you along.

I agree with some of the reviews here. While I appreciated this book, I couldn’t get into it either. Very little actually happened until the last two chapters, and no closure was given at the end. It would have been more interesting to read about what happened post-hurricane.

"Salvage the Bones" is easily one of the worst novels I've ever finished--and I finished to see if the end would redeem the book overall, but that wasn't the case. The novel is not badly done on one or two levels; it's badly done on just about all of them. Some reviewers have said "well-written, bad book"; I don't see it that way. "Bones" is actually a very good example of pretentious writing, which is to say attempting to be profound and failing, or attempting to be lyrical and simply overwriting. Because opinions diverge on good/bad writing, I'll offer a few examples.

"Manny threw a basketball from hand to hand. Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly." (p.5) This is just plain old purple.

Here Ward is trying to be down-home and folksy: "Manny's face was smooth, and only his body spoke: his muscles jabbered like chickens." Try visualizing that. I just can't.
And then there's plain old bad: "I turned the knob and the water that burst out of the spigot was as hot as boiling water." Describing the temperature of water as being as hot as boiling water? Wouldn't a single word--"scalding" or even "boiling"--have done the job?

"[The dog's] breasts are all swollen, and the puppies pull at them. She is a weary goddess." Yes, the doggie is a goddess because she had a litter of puppies. [Note: all females in this book are goddesses, or are smarter, stronger or more special than any of the males in the book.]

Here's a particularly bad extended metaphor: "Sometimes I wonder if Junior remembers anything, or if his head is like a colander, and the memories of who bottle-fed him, who licked his tears, who mothered him, squeezed through the metal like water to run down the drain, and only leave the present day ..." Starting off with the cliché "head like a sieve" (colander isn't fooling anyone)" this just goes on to get worse.

"...we hadn't had a good rain in weeks. The shower we needed was out there in the Gulf, held like a tired, hungry child by the storm forming there."

The last sentence illustrates another problem; sometimes the narrator likes to speak as though she is just a po' gal wit' no vocabulary (although we know she likes to read ... Faulkner no less--the author herself, I'm sure--and she's smarter than everyone else, of course), and sometimes, as she does here, the author goes for the slant rhyme--"storm forming"--but it doesn't sound natural in the sentence, it pings wrong off the ear. The author couldn't stick with the down-home sound because then she'd have to give up all those writerly sentences and phrases staining the prose purple.

Here the narrator sounds almost British (add an English accent as you read): "Only one puppy is dead even though it is China's first time birthing. China scratches at the earth floor of the shed as if she would dig a hole and bury the puppies from sight." Well, British except for the weird use of "bury *from*", which I've never heard/seen before.

Bad writing, weak characters, overblown females, stilted dialogue aside (clearly, I don't have time for examples of all of this), what is most repulsive about this book is that Ward thinks dog-fighting is somehow honorable, sublime, and the ultimate proof of love. Skeetah (more down-home and folksy than Skeeter), puts his dog (China) in the arena for money or "honor" (Ward babbles on about this at the back of the book though it's funny how a dog's pain and suffering somehow redeem the honor of a human standing safely on the side).

Her descriptions of the fights are badly done and unrealistic, yet Ward is clearly in love with them--a "red shawl" to describe a dog covered with blood. Alas, a dog's fur soaked with blood looks nothing like a fashion statement. The color is not uniform, the fur is unevenly matted or even clumped in places, so the texture is not uniform either (as we imagine the shawl to be). It's a creative writing-class way of sanitizing a dog fight. Ward also makes numerous comparisons to "kissing" during these fight scenes, as if she is trying to show the "violent love" in dog fighting, but there isn't any; it's just violent. And her book is a misguided attempt to elevate this practice rather than show it for what it is. At the character level, Skeetah is taking what he loves most, China, and forcing her, out of loyalty and trust, to fight dogs she's never met. This is the great love story at the anemic heart of this novel. And somehow, this pathology received a national book award. Politics anyone?

A hurricane is threatening Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's family is preparing for it. Her mother died a while ago, and her father is a drunkard. They are trying to stock up food, but there isn't much at all. Esch is fifteen and pregnant and her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his pit-bull's prized puppies. The story takes place over 12 days. I enjoyed this book. I really loved the characters, including Esch and Skeetah, as well as the pit-bull, China. The book describes this brutal dog-fighting racket where dogs are matched up together. It seemed kind of strange that Skeetah cares so much for China, yet he lets her fight and risk her life and kill other dogs. Esch is also a great narrator in this book, and very observant.

*You can read all of my reviews at my book blog, novareviews.blogspot.com*

Wonderful view into the world of a family in pre-Katrina New Orleans and how they dealt with the storm. The characters were well-developed and facinating. I hope there will be a sequel because I hated saying good-by.

I could barely read the last paragraph of this book, my eyes were so filled with tears. I haven't been as emotionally invested in a book in a long time. I was on pins and needles waiting to see what would happen to this vulnerable family.

I have only a slight criticism and that is that there were several medical inaccuracies surrounding the dogs (example- China the pit bull becoming drenched with sweat; dogs do not sweat from their bodies like that) I probably only noticed because I am a veterinarian. It did not affect my appreciation of the book, but the author probably should have had a vet read over the manuscript prior to publication since the dogs feature so prominently in the story.

Yes, this is a dark book, but it has a lot to say about our need to give and receive love and how love is really the only thing that can sustain us when things are at their absolute bleakest.

This book was well written however I am not really sure what the point was. Was this a survival story? A coming of age/innocence lost story for Esch that occurs while Hurricane Katrina approaches. Maybe this was a story about how 4 children cope with an impoverished life after losing their mother and their father is emotionally detached due to his alcoholism and grief. Maybe this book was about a father's failure to connect with and love his children that causes his only daughter to sleep with anyone because she is looking for love and validation, another to try and escape through basketball, another to find his love and validation via the love of his fighting dog, and the 4th and baby child being raised by his older siblings. The only way he can show love is to try and prepare to survive and weather the category 5 Hurricane that is making landfall in Bois Sauvage. I thought the comraderie/love/closeness between Esch, Skeetah, Randall, and Junior was touching but that is about all I really love of the book.

This novel is life-changing, the sort of novel that lifts you out of your day-to-day life and rachets you beyond. This voice is unbelievable; distinct but in a way that I have not heard before. I have taught English for years, I've read too many novels to count in a lifetime. I have never been so moved by a voice; the raw, clean writing is breathtaking. I wept as I have never wept when reading a novel, except for Steinbeck, but I must admit, this novel took me closer to edge of life than even he managed to do. I will never forget this novel; it will resonate with me forever. I will follow this author everywhere--a voice like this voice, this raw underlying passion, this heart and soul bleeding on page without becoming senimental, delivering, delivering, page after page, until the next page seems too much to turn but you MUST, perhaps happens once in lifetime. And I am happy to know that I heard it. Bravo. Bravo.

Salvage the Bones is one of the best books I've ever been privileged to read. A genuine example of literary art, Salvage has everything you want in a work of fiction: intelligent and accomplished writing; compelling, well-drawn characters; and a beautiful and compelling story. With Salvage the Bones, Ms. Ward succeeds masterfully in creating a mesmerizing sense of place like her predecessors the great Mississippi authors Eudora Welty and William Faulkner. I couldn't put it down. This book is Pulitzer-worthy.

The author's talent is evident from the first paragraph, and transports you to the Mississippi bayou, weeks before hurricane Katrina. She captures and conveys violence in such a way that there is beauty in its horror. Highly recommended—I didn't want the book to end.

Jesym Ward’s novel reads like prose – filled with metaphor and descriptive passages. Esche, the protagonist of Salvage the Bones, is someone that I easily could have related to a few years ago. She’s infatuated with a jerk who does not love her back, she is the caretaker of the family, and she loves to read. Although she is ordinary [claiming the only thing she is good at is sex], poor, and now pregnant, her voice and grasp on literature put her years ahead of other teenagers. Told in her unique voice, this story of rural living and the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina becomes a poem about love and family.
Although Ward’s writing is beautiful, I felt that it could not carry the novel by itself. The story read extremely slowly. Readers knew the hurricane was coming yet we were forced to endure each day in the life of Esche – dog fights, basketball fights and all, and I didn’t connect with the material as perhaps other readers did. I would have liked to see how the family dealt with the aftermath of the hurricane, but the novel ends right as the storm is over. Even the prose, the strongest point of the novel, sometimes got too caught up in itself. A simple metaphor easily could turn into a paragraph causing the reader to lose interest or become confused. Although I didn’t care too much for Salvage the Bones, I would be interested in looking out for Ward’s next novel.

Jesmyn Ward tells this story through the point of view of Esch, a motherless teenage girl raised among men. More than anything, this novel struck me as a coming of age story as we see Esch gain agency as a young woman after becoming pregnant and make astute observations about the world she lives in. This family does not have much, but what they do have is love, dignity, and a neighboring community that cares about them. Their fates are intertwined, and Ward includes frequent nods to Edith Hamilton's Mythology to highlight the classical themes of romance, betrayal, hubris and revenge.

Ward's descriptions of the dynamics of dog fighting are accurate both to the characters and the world they live in; the peculiar but real love between Skeetah, Esch's older brother, and his pit bull China is examined in great detail throughout the novel. I was extremely impressed by Ward's ability to provide a nuanced depiction of the fighting itself -- she does not provide tidy morality for her readers, but lets them see the carnage and come to their own conclusions. Finally, when the hurricane arrives, it isn't used as a quick ending to the problems facing Esch or her brothers and father. Often huge events late in a story overshadow the conflicts that arose before it, but Ward successfully avoids this pitfall by keeping the scope of the devastation local and particular to her characters. The hurricane scenes themselves were a thrill to read -- not since Their Eyes Were Watching God have I seen a storm so majestically rendered in prose. The end of this novel is full of HOPE, not despair, and I look forward to more from Ward in the future.

I listened to this book on audio. The narrator's voice was such an asset to this story. The story itself, although an ugly but real lifestyle, was haunting. The flaws of each of the characters were so well described, that I loved each and every one of them (except for Manny and Daddy). I fell in love with just the story itself and how Hurricane Katrina affected that small area of town. If you are an animal lover, the dog fighting scenes and how the dogs live on a daily basis is hard to take. But the family does not live very much better than the dogs. Poverty is all around that town and dog fighting is the norm. Besides the dog fighting, there is explicit sexual scenes, so not recommended for youngsters.

The outrageous, painterly talent of this author almost overpowers the story, but when the storm comes, the taut narrative takes center stage and the book is impossible to put down. Esch and her brothers are characters we've not met before, and their entrance into American literature signals a different kind of storytelling. I loved this book and recommend it to anyone brave enough to face the devastation (Katrina, and the family-scale disarray) and heartful enough to stay open to its hard-earned beauty.

This book is truly amazing. I don't understand some of the reviews that others have written. Did anyone really think that a story about Hurricane Katrina would have a happy ending? This novel is about uncomfortable subjects that most people don't want to be exposed to. Real things sometimes are hard to take. I found parts of it to be difficult to read...I actually skipped the last part of one chapter because it was too much. I still am very glad that I read it and will recommend it to everyone.

BTW...I was right outside of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. I was riding out the storm with foster dogs from my animal rescue chartity. So...I was there and I'm an animal lover. The book touched on some hard subjects for me but I still can't recommend it more highly.

This was one of the hardest books I ever read because the subject was so profoundly challenging. I do not know this world of which she rights; I have privilege that has kept me from both the powerful threat of weather destroying my existence and from the poverty that this family lives in. Plus, I am white.

Still, I dropped into the world of this story because Ward is a talented writer whose use of language is rich and fresh. By the end, I was as invested in the outcome of a dog fight as I had been repelled by those same fights at the beginning of the book.

An amazing, life-changing read

This book is a beautifully written tour de force;gritty and lyrical, depressing and uplifting. At first you feel that you are back in an earlier America but soon realize it is the reality in today's Rural south.Ward vividly portrays the overall devastation of Katrina as linked to the hardship of being poor.It is powerful because of Ward's descriptive ability and her use of the vernacular. She deftly weaves a broad, multicolor tapestry of hope and disappointment with the theme of Greek tragedy ever present as the underlying thread. So many different personal stories combine to portray love (sexual,parental,friendship)and loss. The book makes you weep, despair and then rejoice for man's capacity to overcome. "Salvage the Bones" is a sophisticated cliffhanger with many quotable passages.

This is the best book I have ever read in my life. As a Black woman who grew up in a small rural town in Louisiana, I feel Jesmyn perfectly captured the scenery of the south and how it feels spiritually.

I read this book when it first came out, and let me tell you, it has had such a lasting impression on me, that I still think back to it after years of reading it. Not many books affected me as this one did. And I don't even live in the South. I recommend it highly.

I tried to push past the beginning chapters but couldn't.

Growing up in the South has tainted novels like this as both too real and too fake. The dialogue, oppressive father figure, poverty, dialect, and onrush of impending emotional wreckage... so much was familiar, yet at the same time so forced.

That's simply because of my background, I admit. The novel is well written. The attention to detail is good. But in the end, there wasn't any room to breathe here. From the first pages you know where this is going and it ain't a happy place.

This book was a tear jerker! The dog and everything else made me cry! If I judged this book by the cover I probably wouldn't have picked it up but I'm glad I have better sense. Need less to say I purchased and read the book in about a day or two because I simply couldn't put the darn thing down. Such a Great Read!

This is a fantastic novel. Jesmyn Ward's prose is beautiful and perfectly captures both the fierce power of a hurricane and the complex emotions of a teenage girl. It is a heartbreaking read but worth the tears. I look forward to reading more from this author.

It was hard to stay engaged with the story or characters, because the telling of the story felt disjointed. There is definitely potential, because some of the characters have an unique perspective that I wanted to explore more. I also find the chapter 'timeline' set-up to not make the story as believable.

I loved this book. Not to be cliche, but this author has a way with words and has a very poetic style. She provides great imagery and descriptions where other authors would have taken an easier route to say "the sky was blue". This is what separates her book from a piece of fiction and makes hers a piece of fiction literature. How she tells the story is great, but the story she tells is even greater. I fell in love with and felt empathetic for the characters in the story. Although we only spent 12 days with them, what we learned about them and their struggles, their victories, and how they constantly overcome defeat, covered more than 12 days. I liked how the author gave each character equal time in the light. Even China and her puppies were well developed characters and I felt they were significant to the plot. What I thought about most when reading this story was that these chracters were very young, all still teens, yet they were acting like adults and taking on adult roles because they had to. Yes, they were making some bad choices along the way but who was there to guide them to make better ones? Although they were good at protecting Jr they didn't understand him and thought he was being weird or boisterous when in fact he was being a normal young kid. Sadly, many kids today are in similar situations. Kids raising kids because while the parents are physically there they are still absent. Finally, I know all too well the aftermath of Katrina. The descriptions were very realistic. The author was spot on with this one. I look forward to future work from Ms. Ward.

Ward brings us into the steamy heat and poverty with a storm brewing. This novel was powerful and moving. Exquisitely written. If you know the real rural Gulf coast beyond NOLA and the touristy Bourbon Street this book will touch you. Highly recommended!

Simply one of my favorite books, ever. A touching and compelling relevant human story told in a glorious, mesmerizing and poetic manner. So few books have such a beautiful story with equal quality of writing.

This book is a glimpse into the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. And of poverty. It is also a glimpse into the triumph of family ties and love. Not an easy subject to read about, but worthwhile reading.

I enjoyed most everything about this book. The characters were phenomenal, the story telling was engaging and the description was top-notch. What I did not appreciate were the grueling dog fights. If this might bother you as well, skim these parts, but do not miss this beautiful account of the plight of those who endured Hurricane Katrina.

How do I describe this book? I couldn't put it down. It wasn't just a story, it was prose; I was pulled in. It was not like any book I've ever read before. A Greek tragedy told by a black goddess. I mourn for China, ached when she sailed away.

Wow, this novel was a really unexpected treasure. Not since The Road have I read something that I both recoiled from and fell in love with. The novel is a string of vignettes dealing with poverty, animal brutality, hurricane Katrina, and unrequited love. I completely believed these characters and their situation which made many of the passages that much harder to read. If I'm making the book sound like work to get through, let me assure, it's not. I found myself staying up late to finish several chapters wanting to know what happened to this family. And like The Road, the poetry of the language lifted the material to sublime heights. Read it and weep!

I couldn't put this book down. The writing brought me to a world I am totally unfamiliar with (I'm from the northeast and not in the same socioeconomic class), which is one of the reasons I love reading so much. Having just lived through, though not seriously affected by, Superstorm Sandy, I found it fascinating to read about Katrina from a "firsthand" view. Yes, the story is a dark one (if you want happy endings read Danielle Steele) but, like Angela's Ashes, the love in this family is what holds them together through difficult circumstances. I am looking forward to more from this author.

Finished Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones this afternoon. What a piece of literature. I love the way she presents her story, not really making the book about Katrina in the same sense that Cormac McCarthy's The Road is really not about an apocalyptic event. She will be recognized as one of the great writers of our time.

This was a hard book to read on some levels. The characters, who are wonderfully depicted, lead such incredibly difficult lives. There is 14 year old Esch Batiste, and her father and three brothers all trying to get by living in a small patch of land in bayou county, called the pit. Her father senses a storm is coming and begins to prepare for it way before the word begins to leak in over the radio that a hurricane is brewing in the Gulf of Mexico...Katrina. This novel is about the twelve days leading up to being hit. There is tenderness, greed, rawness and love all patched together to make a memorable and sad impression that lingers long after you close the book.

Ward creates a story that humanizes Katrina for those who simply watched the devastation on their screen, from the comfort of their home. The loss of one's mother and the way we try to remember yet heal from the loss rings true throughout the novel. Her characters are lovely, brutal, and bold. One will not want to put the book down, hoping they all survive.

Surviving the storm

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist who was inspired to become a writer by a tragic event the year she graduated college: the death of her younger brother who was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver. After writing her first novel, Ward was surprised to receive three notable awards. Her second book also received an award: the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction. This award honored the novel, Salvage the Bones, which was published by Bloomsbury USA, New York on August 30th, 2011. Salvage the Bones was inspired by the traumatic experiences that Ward and her family experienced in Hurricane Katrina. The novel is a must read because it engages readers by its vivid, dramatic, and realistic plot.

Salvage the Bones highlights the lives of a black poverty-stricken and motherless family who must protect and foster each other during the obstacles they face. Ward’s novel is told in the voice of a 15 year-old girl, Esch Batiste. Esch and her family, consisting of her alcoholic father and three crazy brothers, live in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, where Hurricane Katrina is about to destroy their costal town. In the midst of preparing for the hurricane, Esch realizes that she is pregnant by her brother’s best friend, Manny, who Esch calls “the love of her life.” With all the hustle and bustle of the hurricane and keeping her pregnancy a secret, Esch’s brother, Skeetah, is doing anything he can to keep his pit bull and its newborn puppies alive.

Esch is a careless, naïve, yet passionate young girl who “…embraced those boys [she’d] f***ed because it was easier to let them get what they wanted instead of denying them, instead of making them see [her]” (238). Esch does not mind that Manny takes advantage of her because she thinks “he wants my girl heart” (16).

However, Esch is oblivious to the fact that Manny is using her. Manny could not care less about Esch’s feelings towards him, nor does he think there is any connection between them. Luckily, Esch is able to come to terms with the fact that Manny does not like her when she sees him with another girl. This worries Esch because she does not want to tell Manny that she is carrying his child. She manages to keep her secret throughout more than half of the novel, but just imagine what happens when her secret is exposed.

Although Esch is too young to be pregnant, she is forced to play the role of the mother in her family. Esch’s mother passed away when she was giving birth to her youngest son, Junior. Since then, Esch has been in charge of taking care of her family because her dad’s heavy drinking has caused him to be absent most of the time. She must search for food and supplies for the category five storm that is about to take over Bois Sauvage. Even though Esch is close with her family, she still feels alone and that she needs a mother figure to help her.

Nonetheless, Esch is not the only mother figure in this novel. Her brother, Skeetah, takes care of his pregnant pit bull and its sick, dying litter.

“For the past week, Skeetah has been sleeping in the shed, waiting for the birth…. He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh” (3).

Skeetah unintentionally demonstrates the way that Esch wants to nurture her baby; with love, care, and affection. Unfortunately, the upcoming hurricane panics Skeetah because he is afraid he will lose the puppies if their house gets flooded. Esch is also nervous of what can happen to herself and most importantly, her baby.

After reading the novel, the Washington Post said that, “Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. She evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. A palpable sense of desire and sorrow animates every page here.”

I enjoyed reading this novel because Ward taught me a few valuable lessons about motherhood, passion, and love. The novel taught me that if a person truly loved me, then he would not force me to do something that I do not want to do. He will love me for who I am. It also taught me that family comes first because they will always be there for you in the end. These themes can be relevant to people of all ages in real life, inspiring others as well (particularly teenagers and above). With this said, go and hop on the couch, kick of your shoes, and dig your nose into this intense novel that will leave you wanting more.

As hurricane Katrina is building in the gulf, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's dad is very afraid. He doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are getting food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she eats, because she is fifteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his pit bull's 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.
There are a lot of good and bad things about this book. One good thing the author did well is how much detail she put into their everyday life. Like how she gets the narrator to say in (p108),
"Daddy is knocking down what is left of the chicken coop. The chickens and a rooster have long abandoned it. After summers of heavy rain the wood grew soft and rotten, and then the short, knuckle-freezing winters dried it up and hollowed the woody pulp out, and it began to sag and buckle into the earth."
Just telling you about something that relates to what they are doing but it really has nothing to do with it. Another good thing is the way she describes every sight and sound just so you can imagine what is going on in the story. Showing this on (p.109),
"Thwack, thwack, thwack, sounds the hammer. The wood creaks. One panel falls off. Daddy begins cussing, calling down sonofa-bs, f this's, and gotdammits."
Those are the better thing's she put in this book, but there's also some things that I could barely read. One of the worst things she puts in this book is all the sex scenes, this book is a National Book Award winner keep it classy not throw in profane thinking in the middle of the story. It does lead up to her getting pregnant, but we don't have to know how the deed was done. Just like on (p16),
"Manny touched me first where he always touched me... He grabbed and pulled, and my shorts slid down. His fingers tugged my .., his forearms rubbed my waist, and the brush of his skin burned like a tongue."
Even if this leads to other things, does anyone really want to hear about a fifteen year-old girl doing it? Not many do so they really should have thought that over before they mentioned it over and over again in the story. By the end of the book all the reader is thinking about is if her both of her parents would have been there maybe she would not of been like that. The one character that stuck out the most would be Skeetah. Just how much care he has for China, his pit bull that he raised since it was little. Their bond was one of the biggest things in the story how if anything happened to China, Skeetah wouldn't know what to do with his self. The theme of this story is the hardest thing to find because the story goes in so many different directions, but thinking about it, you got to say that it is mostly about Esch and the trouble her and her family has in everyday life before a hurricane that messes up their whole life.

I was surprised at how small a part the hurricane actually played in the story. The sections on pit bull fighting are graphic and brutal, but the bond between the boy and his dog is the strongest in the book. Esch and her brothers and father take care of each other as best they can, but there's a persistent sense that the family just won't make it. This book is a harsh look at rural poverty.

The author gives an interesting account of poor rural family life before Katrina. Interwoven is an unusual relationship between a dog fighter and his love for his dog. Although I despise animal cruelty, I found myself enjoying that character and the juxtaposition between love and cruelty.
I enjoyed the writer's style and the voice of the narrator. However, I wished the novel were longer and didn't end so abruptly.

Recently read this for my book club and it was a delight. The topics raised are heavy. The characters complex and well-developed. The story tragic yet inspiring. Ward is an excellent and beautiful writer. I would gladly read her work again and am so thrilled I had an opportunity to read this piece of work.

I would give this book 2.5 stars. The writing is interesting at first but it gets tedious. Good books should find a balance between their lyrical prose and a good story. This book overdid the writing and didn't have enough of a story. I was a little bored halfway through but I finished it. It was just okay.

This book recreates the lash of Hurricane Katrina in a novel way, The characters were vividly portrayed and very alive. I was drawn into this story of a family, and I cared deeply about the outcome.

A real page turner. I could not put it down. Delicate and honest yet powerful as Katrina, this truly exceptional writing about family will make you question life's lessons with no judgment or agenda forced by the author.

Well, maybe I just "don't get" this book. It is a story of a poor family living in Louisiana as a hurricane is about to hit, told from the perspective of the young girl of the family. She is the only female of the household, her mother having died in childbirth. It talks about their trials and tribulations of not having enough money, trying to prepare for the hurricane, about her brothers fighting Pitbull (hence the dog on the cover,) her finding out she is pregnant, the dysfunctional dynamics of the children's relationship with their drunken father, the connection she has with her siblings, etc. It did a good job of capturing the feel of the area and how poor the folk are. But as far as the book itself goes, it wasn't a compelling read and when it ended I felt like saying "that's it?" Not a book I would recommend to friends, but maybe there is a deepness to it that I am just to dense to understand. There is symbolism with the Pitbull and their struggle, but I just didn't feel very emotionally connected to anyone in this story. It reads almost like a diary and I felt like I was left hanging at the end.

Whilst written well, it wasn't a complex story and neither were the characters. Their reactions to situations were predictable and often the situations were predictable. There were a lot of words for little story.

A book I would put as a must read - it gives poignant insight into the life of a LA family, surrounding Hurricane Katrina, and as someone growing up in Mississippi, I found it to be incredibly moving and accurate.

I chose this rating because this was a book in which one could connect with the family and stay intrigued as they prepared for a storm in which no one expected it to be different than the previous storms in the area. Only the adults had ever experienced a category 5. This book also showed a family and community that did not have much but they worked together to help each other. I would recommend this book.

"Salvage the Bones" is not only about the incoming storm, Hurricane Katrina, as awful as it was to be. It is about the storm in all of our lives, the twirling dervishes the uproot our inner psyches, that destroy our dreams, and pummel our hopes about what life could be for ourselves. It is about the ability to keep going, because we have no choice. To accept the unacceptable.
I keep seeing the visions of the characters in the book, they are etched in mind like I could touch them--because they live.
I loved the story. It made me mad and sad, all at the same time.

Wonderful book. I loved it.

The dog on the cover, and the description on the dust jacket, initially drew me to this book. That being said, the slowness of the story, and the disturbing elements (namely the dog fighting sub-plot) made this book a turn-off for me. It took me forever to slog through it, and I just couldn't bring myself to connect with the characters, except for maybe Esch, the narrator and main character. I also found it difficult to like the characters, based on their ignorance of certain issues (Esch's promiscuity, and the caring and fighting of the dog, for example), although I realize that the author was going for realism, not political correctness.

In addition, I find first person, present tense, narrative style to make it slightly more difficult to follow the plot, but this is merely a personal preference of mine.

That being said, I give kudos to the author for the brutal honesty of the story, it just wasn't my personal cup of tea.

If anyone had wondered if I'd like to read a novel in which a pit bull trained for fighting is central in the story I would have said, "Not likely!" But I did read "Salvage the Bones" because a friend recommended it. I thank her for turning me on to it. I was astonished by Ward's original style; I was hooked from the first paragraph. Being "young, gifted, and black" describes Jesmyn Ward perfectly.

Awful book. Too much description, as if the author is really trying hard to write an award winning book. I have no idea why this book would win an award. I kept trying to read on, then about 1/3 of the way through I noticed myself snapping the book closed and putting it by the door to return to the library. My subconscious knew it was a lost cause even before I admitted it to myself.

This remarkable novel takes us into the world of Esch and her three brothers as a hurricane looms off the coast of Mississippi. It still remains the best novel I have read in the last few years and provides a window into the world of a group of people we are unlikely to meet in our own safe lives. I can't recommend it highly enough.

It is not often that I feel myself unable to finish a book, but it has been painful for me to work through Salvage the Bones. The book has promise, and reading other reviews, I do see what others found appealing. It is certainly a powerful immersion into a poor southern family's daily life, illustrating a cycle of poverty so difficult to transcend - from poor education that leaves little room for progress or opportunity, to the fragility of the impoverished family that crumbles with a mother's death, to the resultant lack of confidence that leads to the repetition or worsening of behavior in the next generation. In this sense it was very real and heart-wrenching.

On the other hand, I felt the story was sometimes painfully slow. I can handle slow plots, but reading a slow telling of something I don't care about - like the never-ending details of the dog's pups - was too boring and unimportant to me. My other issue was the writing style itself. I felt Ward never really succeeded in playing the role of a teenage girl. Her metaphors were so elaborate and sophisticated - and often in needless junctions - that I could not ever engage with it as a child's narration. I think Ward would have been more successful if she had not given the role of narration to her main character.

Written from the perspective of a 15 o yo African American American female, growing up before her time, I found the writing almost poetic, but the content insightful and I believe I came away with some kind of appreciation for life in the rural Gulf Coast I did not have before. An easy read. Would recommend this to most all readers.

This book won me over from page one. The description of Esch's family, the hurricane, her struggles (and the dog!!) were so vivid and had me completely engaged. There are some truly beautiful passages here -- especially concerning her family's fierce, tough love for each other -- that really stayed with me after finishing the book. Highly recommend this.

This book was chosen by our book club for July, I am tempted to leave the club for picking such a dismal novel.
Dread, dispair, gloom, racism, not a single character had any redeeming qualities.
Awful, depressing, pointless. The complete opposite of literature.
A complete waste of my time.

This is the first time I have written a review for the store but I feel very strongly that others need to read this book. With all the popular fiction out there these days, I hunger for a novel that is true literature. This novel is so beautifully written that almost every sentence needs to be savored. Do your brain a favor and read this book!

This is the 53rd Natioal Book Award fiction prizewinner I have read. It tells of a motherless black family in Louisiana--A father who drinks too much, an 18 yeaar old basketball aspirant, a 17 yeaar old who has a dog, China, and is about the most admirable person in the novel. a 16 year old girl who tells the story and has been promiscuous since she was 12 and early in the book finds she is pregnant, and Junior, about 5. Outside of an exciting dog fight the forepart of the book is not too memorable and there is too much unnecessary verbal obscenity. The final chapters find the family overwhelmed by Hurricane Katrina and is melodramatic. The ending chapters make the book somewhat of a success.

Graphic sex scenes of a 12 and then 15 year old girl having sex. Not what I had in mind when I bought the book. Did not finish it. The writing was also very poetic lots of comparisons. Started to get annoying.

A riveting account of the effect hurricane Katrina had on the people of the area
This novel is a gateway to outsiders who want to understand what it was like to be in the path of a super storm.
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Beautiful, poetic writing transports the reader to rural Mississippi to peer through the window into the mind and soul of Esch—a young lady with troubles far more complex than the impending hurricane.

As we look back upon Superstorm Sandy in the metropolitan New York area, this book chronicles the destruction in an area with little infrastructure to support it. The inner strength of the protagonist is an example for us all.

I had to read this book over the summer for a summer project and I thought the book overall was okay. No I wouldn't have picked this book up if it was not assigned. The characters are relatable, I just thought it was okay.

What stands out to me most about Ward's writing is how astonishingly pure and true it is. Just crystal clear. She is early in her career, yet comparisons are already being made to some true literary icons. Deservedly so.

Outstanding 2nd novel from Jesmyn Ward. One part John Steinbeck, one part Toni Morrison, "Salvage the Bones," is a poetic novel full of heartbreaking plot twists and breathtaking prose. "Salvage the Bones" explores family dysfunction and the nature of love. A truly beautiful novel by a great, great new writer. This is one novel that won't disappoint!

Jéanpaul Ferro, author of Jazz by Honest Publishing

There is a reason that new author Jesmyn Ward is the National Book Award Winner. We believe Ward captures the essence of the South better than any writer since Faulkner. Salvage the Bones is the story of how a few days can change a family forever. Ward's prose will stay with you for a long time.

this is one of the best novels I have read in some time. It is beautifully written, the characters come alive - you can actually see and taste and smell every one of them and the themes are so powerful. This is truly an exceptional book.

This book is raw in its physicality complete with brutal dog fights, sweat and humidity, and casual sexual encounters. It also has a tender and gentle side as exemplified by the sibling relationships. I thought it was beautifully written. I will choose this author again.

Why do authors think it is necessary to use the Lord's name and the name of Jesus as swear words or slang? I find this offensive! Not realism. What some might call poetic I define as tedious. The over use of metaphors overpowered the characters and story line. This was a book club pick and I was the discussion leader or I would have quit reading the book by day three. As soon as the discussion is over, I intend to get this book out of my home.

It was written Ohhhh kay, but the content is awful - the characters deserve a slapping, all. Oh and dog lovers be aware, it contains a LOT of dog-fighting. Also, spoiler alert, the dog dies. The puppy's die. The end.

Salvage the Bones was a very enjoyable book with strong character development and continuous plot. The primary characters, which in mnay cases are siblings, showed great compassion for each other in a believeable manner. The actions of the characters never felt contrived or embellished for literary purposes. If you like books in the Russo or Banks style, then you will highly likely enjoy this book.

I found this to offer some interest. It is about a young girl growing up in the south in poverty with only four brothers, father and neighboring boys. It is a situation girls have found themselves in where they are not taught about growing into a woman and about our bodies.
The children basically are raising themselves. It is also about desperation of some for money. Young love is also included.
The author gets "hung up" on about three topics and is repetitive and slow.
Profanity and sexual situations are bold and therefore unacceptable for Young Adult reading.
Although I emphasize with the situations, I find them so drawn out that it loses the reader's interest.
I won this in a giveaway and appreciate the authors and publishers that give this opportunity. I however will donate this to a library, I would not recommend it nor would I keep it in mine.

I read so many rave reviews about this book, but I was just really let down. I get the rawness of the story in dealing with an impoverished family from the deep south on the precipice of a disaster and their survival and love for each other, but I just did not find this story that interesting. I think the only parts I was really interested in reading were the outcome of the dogfight and if they survived the actual hurricane. I still want to know if they ever find the dog! Are we just going to assume Skeet waits there for the rest of his life? I wasn't expecting a happy ending by any means, but I just felt like the book just ENDED without real closure.

It's amazing that so many people liked this story - I thought it was just "ok." The only parts that were page-tuners to me were the dog fight and the actual hurricane and its aftermath. The rest of the story was rather flat for me and the writing style made it very difficult to embrace. I'm glad I can mark this one off of my list.

I bought this book only because it was a national book award winner. Makes me never want to read another winner again. The writer must have been paid a bonus for every metaphor and simile as they are literally every other sentance. Written in southern black trash speak with the occasional word you probably will have to look up. Way too much puking and sweating, so much so that I quit the book just before I got to the halfway point. I simply could not waste another minute on it and am wishing I could get the hours back that I wasted on the pages I did suffer through. I

I would not recommend anyone to read this book if your in a depressed state. The book is about loss, loneliness and poverty. The loss of a mother while birthing her last child. A father deep into alcoholism and denial. The children having to deal with their loss with no guidance, or sharing. No one to turn to for advice,guidance or love. All they had were each other, and Esch not realizing sex isn't love finds herself pregnant, afraid and unable to tell anyone. They all literally had to fend for themselves. The oldest boy Skeeter sees his way out by giving all his love to his fighting dog China. Randall sees his escape as basketball and attending camp this summer. Junior is only seven and it seems that Randall and Esch try to take care of him. Daddy just drinks and gets by.
The arrival of hurricane Katrina took what little they had, but I think it did bring the family a little closer together as they lived through this natural disaster.
All I could think of is why didn't the teachers see their poverty. their hunger. Were people blind?I felt guilty as I read this, am I so self absorded to overlook someone in jeopardy? It made me angry to know this country reachs out to other countries in need but what about our own people that need us ,but are forgotten.

This is a sequel to Wolf Hall. Loved the book.
I want to take the opportunity to let you know I received 3 copies of this book when I only ordered one. Have contacted you many times about this. No response.!!!!!!
I hope I have not been invoiced for 3.
What to do??????
Lynne

Jesmyn Ward has won the 2011 National Book Award in fiction for her novel about a poor, rural Mississippi family which survives Hurricane Katrina, SALVAGE THE BONES. As she hints in her novel, she owes something to William Faulkner, and I believe that debt would especially be to his 1930 novel, AS I LAY DYING, about a poor, rural Mississippi family in the early twentieth century victimized by a flood.

It seems needed to "digress" a bit on Faulkner in an approach to SALVAGE THE BONES.

Faulkner's advice to readers and writers, especially the latter, is to do your most serious reading in a comparatively few literary classics--the Bible, Greek mythology, Greek theater, the Samurai stories, Shakespeare, and others from Ancient to Modern masters.

Faulkner made himself a mythic: he writes about the American south as an "experimental" modernist but his stories are universal, updated versions of classic fundamental myths about the human condition.

GO DOWN, MOSES is an essential Faulkner book: especially its almost mystical episode, "The Bear," telling of a series of annual hunting trips into the Mississippi wilderness in the 1800s in which the woods are a timeless, primeval setting where racial distinctions diminish and a fundamental drama plays out, especially growing up and discovering the beauty, suffering and mystery in human experience, "coming of age." To enter Faulkner's Mississippi wilderness is to receive a natural baptism, to undergo a "rite of passage," a conversion.

Faulkner's ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, based in part on the biblical King David story but far more deeply on the desperate imperative of Adam (here named Thomas Sutpen) to create from a harsh wilderness a refuge following a latter-day version of expulsion from Eden, seems to me Faulkner's greatest and most prevalent work if his initially least accessible. Once you get caught up in it, many other writers seem flat, bland, trivial. Sutpen, born to a poor wandering West Virginia family, is stunned as a boy when as a message-bearer he is turned away from the front door of a Tidewater plantation mansion by a liveried servant who takes the message only at the barred ajar back door; Sutpen spends his prime years in the early-to-mid 1800s creating by Herculean hook and crook "Sutpen's Hundred" in Mississippi, an enormous plantation, a grand refuge, a new Eden; in short, a New World; only to have the storm of the Civil War devastate it and him. Greek and biblical dramas infuse ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

I've never thought AS I LAY DYING one of Faulkner's major works, though many have. The trouble with it, it seems to me, is not its magnificent success as an unprecedentedly experimental novel making a deathly poor and touching family revelatory of us all; the trouble lies in its constrained scope, its smaller drama, its lack of Big News. ABSALOM, ABSOLOM! and LIGHT IN AUGUST seem grand in comparison to AS I LAY DYING albeit Faulkner called the latter a tour de force.

SALVAGE THE BONES, giving us some stirring and beautiful writing, might have been written by one of Faulkner's better students (though I don't recall that he formally had any), emphasis on AS I LAY DYING, and accordingly seems not only stylistically but adaptively dated and hence well-written but small. It suffers from the constraints of close patterning, a pitfall no matter how major is your adopted mentor. For example, I've a hunch that its title, and quite beautifully aptly, comes from the second-to-last sentence in the second paragraph of Faulkner's Nobel Prize Speech in Stockholm in 1950 and its context in that paragraph:

"...Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed--love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, and victories without hope and worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands...."

Ward's fictional (but, you feel, modeled closely on her own) family lives near a rural junkyard through which her widowed, tough and embittered father barely manages a living for his daughter, Esch (the narrator of the story), and brothers Skeetah, Randall and Junior. The family loves their pit bull, a bitch named China with a litter. The kid's friends include Big Henry and Esch's heartthrob, Manny, father (at the beginning unknowingly) of her child with whom she has just become pregnant. There is a wonderful chapter about Esch and her brothers and friends stealing worm medicine from a farmer by creeping up on his isolated farm. This adventure takes a step or two into Faulkner's mythological settings.

Otherwise, it seems old if sad as well as sadly defiant news about pit bulls, dog fights, youthful posturing, living on the edge of things, facing the impersonal collossus of Nature. There seems no way out. Sutpen's Edenic urge (so much more revelatory than "greed" and so mythically relevant to an understanding of much human disaster, e.g., the recent Great Recession), Ahab's sublime and very modern anger (far beyond the "Theodicy question")...nothing so grand is to be found in SALVAGE THE BONES.

Perhaps the central problem in this very capable novel can be encapsulated: Esch is reading Greek Mythology at her school and tries, in a way that almost suggests to me a homework assignment, to draw parallels to the life around her. It isn't for me organic to the story. It's tell, not show.

I feel like I am supposed to like this book but I don't know why. I feel like the book is technically well written but what is the point? After I finished the book I spent hours finding interviews with the author to try to understand her motivation/ justification for the story. What I found was that she was interested in the characters. That's the impression I had at the end of the book when I concluded the story was tightly written but soulless. In spite of the unnecessarily graphic narratives in many parts (like the dog fighting)the book left me feeling nothing. "The storm" piece felt like a mechanism to move the story along, and it was actually a smaller part of the story than I expected.

Lastly, as others have noted, the author incorrectly describes the birth of the dog's puppies which annoyed me because it felt like she didn't do her research, instead choosing to focus more on making the scene graphic (which it was) rather than accurate. This book will be going to charity at the end of the year.