My First Great One This Year

Get your mind out of the gutter! Books people, books! Ah January! renewal, resolutions, and for me the beginning of my busiest time of year, pilot season. Once it's underway I never have enough time to read the mail let, alone a novel. So from mid January through April I save up my trash novels. You know, beach reads, like mindless thrillers that don't require much in terms of attention or thought when you turn the last page. So I was so happy to have gotten this one read before the insanity, and I had to share because it's fantastic, and gets the distinction of being my first great read of 2012. It's gonna sound like a downer, but it's not, really. It's savage, and honest, but so well written and so smart I just couldn't wait till December 31st to share.

"Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward

It's your typical story of family sticking together through impossible odds. You know, like The Joads. Only this is a poor black family living in rural Mississippi who are about to face down the Mother of  all storms, Katrina. 

Like the pit bull China that is featured so prominantly in this story, it'll grab hold of your throat and won't let go. Narrated by a teenage age African American girl named Esch, she so beautifully tells of her bother Skeet, and his unfailing love for his brutal dog and her new born pups, her eldest brother Randall, trying desperately to escape the strangling holds of poverty and break into a new life through basketball, and mostly, her burning, unflinching yearning towards Manny, her brother Randall's friend, and the father of her unborn child. Stunning, poetic writing graces these pages, such as this passage describing her brother and a group of boys playing basketball: "they elbow each other, fall and let the concrete peel the skin off their hands, their knees, their elbows away like petals." The great thing about the book is in the face of such terrible adversity that climaxes with, you know, that hurricane, you'd think the book would be a giant downer. Not so.

Instead, Ward manages to create a brutal, beautiful testament to the bonds family and survival.

http://www.amazon.com/Salvage-Bones-Novel-Jesmyn-Ward/dp/1608195228/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1326674276&sr=1-1