Ward deftly sculpts mental images of those things she knows best.Ī fifteen year-old* girl named Esch narrates this novel of a struggling black family in rural Mississippi. The beautiful evocations of late childhood in Salvage the Bones offset the mistakes of tractors that drive like cars and oddly formal playground basketball. I was shaken by some of Ward’s specifics, but stirred by others. Errors of detail shake the trust an author must have from her readers. Our reviewer, Parul Sehgal, wrote that the book “feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an ancient, archetypal tale” reminiscent of “Noah or Gilgamesh or any soggy group of humans and dogs huddled together, waiting out an apocalyptic act of God or weather.I have already griped about some of the slips of detail in Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning novel. The book, which won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction, uses heady language to describe Esch’s desire and weaves in Greek mythology for a fantastical effect. Each character has concerns other than besides the storm, which arrives on the final day and chapter: Esch’s love interest, Manny, may have gotten her pregnant, but wants nothing to do with her her father is busy preparing for the storm and Skeetah, one of her brothers, has a pit bull that has just given birth and tries to sneak out scraps from their scarce supply of food. This novel follows a family - 14-year-old Esch, her three brothers, and their alcoholic father - in the 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, presenting each day as its own vignette. Our reviewer wrote that “50 years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun.” The result is an incisive look at how counterterrorism and Katrina colored life in the Bush era. Eggers toggles between Syria and the United States to explore Abdulrahman’s family. He is mistaken for a terrorist, locked in a cage and subjected to a series of other humiliations. Then one day, six armed officers show up at his house and take him away at gunpoint. In the days after the hurricane hits land, he paddles around the city and rescues residents trapped in collapsing homes. Abdulrahman purchases a 16-foot aluminum canoe as a precaution but is convinced he can weather the storm.

In this work of narrative nonfiction, Eggers follows Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American who stayed in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina while his wife, Kathy, a Southern Baptist who converted to Islam, flees with their children.

Jesmyn ward salvage the bones review