Where the Line Bleeds [Paperback]

Jesmyn Ward (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2008

Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a large extended family in a rural town on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. They’ve just finished high school and need to find jobs, but in a failing post-Katrina economy, it’s not easy. Joshua gets work on the docks, but Christophe’s not so lucky. Desperate to alleviate the family’s poverty, he starts to sell drugs. He can hide it from his grandmother but not his twin, and the two grow increasingly estranged. Christophe’s downward spiral is accelerated first by crack, then by the reappearance of the twins’ parents: Cille, who abandoned them, and Sandman, a creepy, predatory addict. Sandman taunts Christophe, eventually provoking a shocking confrontation that will ultimately damn or save both twins. Ward inhabits these characters, and this world — black Creole, poor, and drug-riddled, yet shored by family and community— to a rare degree, without a trace of irony or distance.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Impoverished twins living along the Mississippi Gulf Coast struggle to survive after high school in Ward's starkly beautiful debut. Abandoned by their mother and raised by their loving but ailing grandmother, Joshua and Christophe DeLisle know job prospects are slim in rural Bois Sauvage, so they spend their days playing basketball and flirting with the local girls. Eventually, even with no work history, Joshua is hired to work on the docks, but Christophe falls in with the brothers' drug-dealing cousin. Too ashamed to admit that he spends his days in the park selling marijuana, Christophe secretly contributes to the family's expenses with regular deposits to his grandmother's purse. But when Christophe decides to start selling more dangerous drugs, tensions between the twins grow, and the arrival of their long-absent drug addict father sparks a violent confrontation. A fresh new voice in American literature, Ward unflinchingly describes a world full of despair but not devoid of hope. (Nov.)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–African-American twins Joshua and Christophe graduate from high school and try to find jobs. While Joshua has success becoming a dockworker, Christophe is less fortunate and desperation eventually finds him turning to drug dealing. The teens are loyal to their grandmother, who raised them after their mother moved to Atlanta to start a new life and their addict father disappeared. While this plot (and the books cover) may be reminiscent of an urban fiction title, the setting is unique–rural Mississippi–and the writing is distinctive. Wards beautiful language allows the location and characters to come alive, while her dialogue, written in a Southern vernacular, adds further texture. The plot is as leisurely as a hot Mississippi summer day, and although not much happens until the somewhat violent and surprising ending, this fully realized character study will appeal to teens who can see themselves here or who are interested in discovering realities far from their own lives.–Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 230 pages
• Publisher: Agate Bolden (November 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932841385
• ISBN-13: 978-1932841381
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #881,306 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jesmyn Ward is a former Stegner fellow at Stanford and Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her novels, Where the Line Bleeds and Salvage the Bones, are both set on the Mississippi coast where she grew up. Bloomsbury will publish her memoir about an epidemic of deaths of young black men in her community. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of South Alabama.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Absorbing and Gritty Portrait, October 28, 2008

By 

Adam Rust "a_rust" (Durham, NC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Where the Line Bleeds (Paperback)

(What's this?)

I really enjoyed Where the Line Bleeds. This book is about choices made growing up in a poor part of America. Christophe and Joshua are fraternal twins, fresh out of high school. When the story opens, they are ready to seek jobs. The future is unclear, if wide open.

They are surrounded with family members whose own lives are either guideposts or hazards. Their father, Sandman, is largely absent because of addiction to drugs. Their mother has left for Atlanta and a series of decent jobs working retail. She provides the brothers with material needs, but she is woefully absent as a caregiver.

Instead, the twins are really cared for by their grandmother, Ma-Mee, and a cousin, Dunny.

Sandman, in particular, is a strong character. Easily he is one of the most pitiable figures in a book that I have read in a long time. For the author to make a person who is an absentee father and an addict into such a person takes a lot of doing. He is a ghost to the reader for a while, but by the end, I felt bad for him.

This book has a strong sense of place. It is set in a small town on the shore line of the Mississippi River. There is not a lot of opportunity in Bois Sauvage, or even in its sister community of St. Catherine's, where the white families live. The soil is full of clay. You need 10 acres to grow enough, so back when it was an agricultural community for African-Americans retreating from New Orleans, the people settled in a very spread out fashion. It is after Katrina. The economy is limited. The port has good jobs. Most jobs are in gas stations or fast food, though.

It was that sense of place that made me like this book so much. There is a lot of detail here that testifies to a way of life: what to get at the store if you want to boil shrimp, the code of conduct among kids playing pick-up basketball, the joy of wearing a nice outfit on the Fourth of July.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars One shared history, two paths to the future, September 25, 2008

By 

BMAR (Northern USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Where the Line Bleeds (Paperback)

(What's this?)

"Where the Line Bleeds" is an intriguing story that looks at fraternal twin brothers, who though they have shared a womb, share very little besides that. Joshua and Christopher pursue drastically different paths - one a straight-laced, hard worker; the other making his mark on the street.

These brothers respond extremely differently to a life without the loving guidance of a mother or father. The author presents may sides to the tale, making it an intriguing read with a little something for many readers.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Languid, atmospheric tale of twins searching for adulthood, October 27, 2008

By 

Arts Lover Karen (California) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Where the Line Bleeds (Paperback)

(What's this?)

Fraternal twins Christophe and Joshua struggle toward adulthood following their high school graduation. The Mississippi Gulf-Coast setting and limited economic opportunities are vividly drawn here, immersing the reader thoroughly in the boys' world and their difficult choices.

So alike when the story begins, the brothers soon begin drifting apart when one finds a job and the other doesn't. Their differences expand as time goes on. Drug-related opportunities and downfalls are always lurking at the edges of this story; the boys' father is a local crackhead known as "Sandman," who's had no more a part in raising them than their self-centered mother (who ran off to Atlanta when the boys were five).

The twins are tied to the area by loyalty to the grandmother who raised them; her blindness and diabetes mean she needs them as they needed her all those years before. They cannot leave her or each other, and being trapped changes which choices still remain.

The version I read was pre-release, with occasional typos. That doesn't explain the roughness of some of the point-of-view shifts, however, the sense of which persists even though the POV is resolved. The narration moves between all three main characters, primarily the twins, but it was the grandmother's character whose perspective was most unexpected and refreshing, particularly her memories of her late husband.

The language and description convey real affection for this Creole region and its people, and an understanding of the emotional prison of abandoned children who can never stop chasing the love of the parent who left them.

This,

"Ma-mee dimming like a bulb, his parents' places unknown and orbiting them like distant moons..."

is the world that awaits the boys.

This slow, rich story details how they come to deal with it.