Our narrator is fourteen with hair that frames her head “like a pillow.” She has three brothers, a father that drinks too much, and several paramours but one in particular. A poor family lives outside a town but near the coast in Mississippi. When I try to say in a few words the story of this novel, everything I write is inadequate.
When she describes the color and texture of a man’s arm, or the watery pressure of a new pregnancy, or the terror of discovering rising water through the floorboards of one’s living room, Jesmyn Ward has caught that thing as though it were alive.
She has put them together in a way that creates a world apart but with all the love, pain, pathos, hope, fear, and loyalty that we will recognize from the finest examples of our literature. Jesmyn Ward just gives us words, but words like none other has written. And there are long stretches at the end of this book when I cannot take my horrified eyes from the page, when I feel my insides crumbling and my heart breaking and my memories reeling and I know I have read something extraordinary. There is a point in the middle when I breathe raggedly, as though from a gut punch (Ward’s description of the dog fight). There is a moment in the beginning of this book when I want to put the book down (the birthing of puppies). A wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, "Salvage the Bones" is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real. As the twelve days that comprise the novel's framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel's heart-motherless children sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to struggle for another day. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt, while brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets she's fourteen and pregnant. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for FictionĪ hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned.
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