Customer Reviews

Salvage the Bones: A Novel

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

As a long time (30+years) English teacher, I always read the National Book Award finalists. I can't remember when a character, a family, or a situation grabbed me so completely; in this case I was taken me into that swampy place with Katrina lurking. I originally read the book from my library. I've ordered it because I want to own it and because all of my friends are now reading it and are anxious to talk about it. This is what fiction is all about.

This is a strong and harrowing story told in the unique and compelling voice of its teenaged narrator, the family's sister Esch. It is often beautiful and is ultimately, though ambiguously, hopeful. Squemish readers, however, beware. Its powerful narrative emerges not only from dreadful poverty and insensitive misogyny, but from a graphic, violent, vicious, and repellant sub-theme which only one reviewer has mentioned: dog-fighting. One reviewer calls this anachronistic, but I believe they were groping and found the wrong word. Would that it were!

"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.

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.

Jesmyn Ward takes you directly into the rural Mississippi landscape and wraps the reader around the breathtaking lives of the Batiste family. Esche and her brothers, Randall, Skeetah and Junior, live in bonecrushing poverty with their defeated and alcoholic Daddy, Claude. Their Mama, Rose, died immediately after giving birth to little 7 year old Junior. She is missed so much by her family that her absence becomes a powerful character all of it's own.
Home is a rundown little house in a junk filled clearing known as the "pit"...the kids run the show as Daddy is present only in the physical and is unable to parent. The 3 teenage children have all managed to find their own particular passions to occupy their barren lives and idol time...Randal is a talented basketball player who has dreams of a professional career, Skeetah is obsessed with his female pit bull,China....whom he breeds and also trains to participate in organized fights. This is a way to earn money for the family and creates social status for Skeetah. Esche finds her solace in making her self available intimately to her brother's friends. This ultimately results in her becoming pregnant at 14...and this is where the story finds her. She is lovely and pathetic at the same time...as she truly loves the father of her baby and attempts to replace the mother that she misses so much in her brother's lives.
The novel is built around hurricane Katrina...and the family's efforts to survive it. I can't remember when I was so completely transported into the life of a literary character as I have been while reading about Esche. The imagery is completely stunning. Beautiful prose and rich atmospheric descriptions left me wanting to stay with the Batiste's just a little longer...it was so hard to close this book for the final time.
The issue of the dog fighting will be off putting to many...unlike some previous reviewers...I do feel that the descriptive nature of the fights were graphic. I would not have missed this book for anything...but the reader will have to decide and be forwarned.
I am so delighted that this extraordinary book won The National Book Award for 2011...so well deserved. Magnigicent.

I loved this book so much I went to the authors blog page to let her know how magical her writing and story was to me. I finished this book in a day. It's a tough story, but beautiful in it's simplicity. My words can't do it justice. Do yourself a favor and read it; I hope you find it as satisfying experience as I have.

As soon as I finished this book, I wanted to start it again. It is a unique story told in a unique voice, but written in the tradition of great American literature. There are echoes of Toni Morrison, of Faulkner, Peter Matthieson's Shadow Country, Dorothy Allison...and even William H. Armstrong's Sounder and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling. And yet the narrator, Esch, and her brothers and father are distinctive characters whose lives, home, and surroundings could not be drawn more clearly and beautifully. The community of Bois Sauvage is linked to the lives of the ancient Greeks through Esch's reading of the story of Medea. The climactic arrival of Hurricane Katrina is immensely gripping and I could not put the book down until I knew its effect on Esch and those she loves. Highly recommended.