A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pit bull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. While brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that comprise the novel's framework yield to the final day and Hurricane Katrina, the unforgettable family at the novel's heart-motherlesschildren sacrificing for each other as they can, protecting and nurturing wherelove is scarce-pulls itself up to struggle for another day. A wrenching lookat the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty,"Salvage the Bone" is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
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[China'sturned on herself]***
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 30 November2017, ebook, 272 pages, copy from publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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This is myfirst time reading the author. I really loved this book. It completely blew me away. Once I started reading I didn't want to stop. The book drew me right in and refused to let me go. I've never come across an author before who makes a fictional world inhabited by fictional people so painfully real. The book is very bleak at times and incredibly sad and very poignant. I loved the way the author uses the terror that is Hurricane Katrina to illuminate the lives ofsuch a broken, dysfunctional yet hopeful family. Esch made my heart break,fourteen years old, pregnant, motherless and surrounded by men. I wanted to lift her up and carry her and her baby to safety. The book takes place over fourteen days but it felt much longer. Ward takes us right into the hearts ofher flawed yet fragile and human characters. The book is brutal at times but I adored it.
