Review: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Title: Salvage the Bones
Author: Jesmyn Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publication Date: 2011
Edition: Hardcover (261 pages)
Genres:

• Fiction
• African American Fiction
• Contemporary
• Cultural

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Esch, a fourteen-year-old girl and her family are smack in the path of Hurricane Katrina. At first, she and her brothers do not take the warnings too seriously. Their father is obsessed with preparing the house for the hurricane's arrival, but his limited parenting skills leave her and her brothers to fend for themselves, for the most part.

Though this book is a fictional account, it reads like fact. The poverty of so many in the area is brought to life in stark and vivid detail. SALVAGE THE BONES is another of those books that will never leave me. Each of the characters reached out from the pages to teach me something about their lives and my own. To be children and caretakers of their father and one another--that is their reality. Doing much with little, and making something out of almost nothing are concepts foreign to many, but this family does both without complaint.