AuthorBuzz

Jesmyn Ward

Dear Librarians,

SALVAGE THE BONES follows Esch, a 15 year-old girl in coastal Mississippi, and her family through the 10 days preceding Hurricane Katrina, and through the immediate aftermath of the storm. Esch's mother died in childbirth, so her family consists of all men: her brothers and her father, who don't really know how to usher Esch into womanhood when she finds she is pregnant at the beginning of the book. Will her brother Skeetah's female pit bull teach her how to understand motherhood, or will it be the ghost of her mother, or perhaps Hurricane Katrina, which spins and gathers her dark fury on the horizon?

Even though this book is about a hurricane, it's about so much more than a hurricane: about fighting and love and loyalty and survival and hope. I think that some of the best books can be read and understood many different ways, and SALVAGE THE BONES does just that. O: the Oprah Magazine has said of the novel, "The novel's hugeness of heart and fierceness of family grip and hold on like Skeetah's pit bull."

Jesmyn Ward
jesmimi.blogspot.com