Cover Image: Where the Line Bleeds

Where the Line Bleeds

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Member Reviews

I haven't read anything from Jesmyn Ward that I didn't like, and this book was no exception. It may not have had the same power as Sing, Unburied, Sing, but this was an enjoyable story about two brothers and the different paths they take after graduation. The characters were well written, and even though the plot occasionally went all over the place, this was another great book from Ward.

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Everything Jesmyn Ward writes is gold. I'm glad to see this one reprinted/reissued given her growing popularity in literary fiction. While I found the plot meandering and a bit slow at times, I find the plot line of twins' lives diverging in different and complicated ways fascinating. Great for fans of Homegoing and The Vanishing Half. Definitely an underrated piece of literature.

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What a nice experience it was to feel transported to Bois Sauvage and experience life through very interesting characters. Jesmyn Ward is an author I adore. Her writing is so impossibly beautiful! I have read Sing, Unburied, Sing and enjoyed it. This? I enjoyed more! The story is slow paced, but for a good reason! It is heartbreaking and heartwarming all at once.
My review probably won't do this book justice. So, just read it if you're into amazing writing and don't mind the slow pace.
I personally can’t wait to read something else by her!

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Thanks for the ARC NetGalley. This is another well-written book by Jesmyn Ward. I would recommend this.

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I love this author's style of writing. It pulls you in and does not let go. Good storyline about 2 brothers and the roads they choose after graduation. As they navigate their way, we get to know Christophe and Joshua as well as Ma-Mee, which is a great influence. Their mother is in and out of their lives. Take a journey with these 2 young men, you will not regret it. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this outstanding book in return for my honest review.

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This is the author's first novel and it was republished in 2018. While I liked this book, I much preferred her later book "Sing, Unburied, Sing". The story is set in rural Bois Sauvage, Mississippi during the summer of the high school graduation of twins Joshua and Christophe, who were raised by their diabetic and blind grandmother. Their feckless parents, Cille and Samuel, had only sporadic contact with the boys. Joshua manages to find a physically demanding job working on the docks. Christophe is embarrassed by his failure to find a job and contribute to the family, and he becomes a small time drug dealer.

There wasn't much plot in this book and the story was too meandering for me. The writing was very good and the brothers and their grandmother were realistic and likable characters. I also liked the close relationship between the brothers that survived the challenges set before them. However, the story was too slow and uneventful for me to love it. There was an awful lot of hair braiding going on.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

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I love everything about Jesmyn Ward and her incredible talent as a writer. It's easy to see the progression in her writing from Where the Line Bleeds to Salvage the Bones to Sing Unburied Sing. Ward just keeps getting better, and I look forward to everything she writes going forward.

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One of the reviews for this book mentions both despair and hope. They definitely go hand in hand in this family story, about twins making their way after high school in Mississippi, where opportunity is hard to find for the impoverished duo.

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Where The Line Bleeds was MacArthur Genius Grant and National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward's first book. The brings the reader once again to the small poverty stricken, racially divided communities of the rural South. The reality that Jesmyn Ward's books portray is that resources and the potential so many of us take for granted in the United States still are not open and available to all of the nation's citizens. Once again, Jesmyn Ward's writing communicates a powerful message.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2018/03/where-line-bleeds.html

Reviewed for NetGalley

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Told in gorgeous, painfully honest prose. Ward speaks to the human condition as it plays out in a world she is intimately familiar with. She is a narrator carrying tradition's burning torch reminding people to remember, consider and see. Publishers should have invested in her long ago as this is her freshman work and it sets the tone for the trilogy. I only wish I had read them in order. Post hurricane Katrina, over one summer Ward tells the story of a family struggling, Black men struggling and the struggle well-told conveys its reality. This is a story of brothers, brotherhood, Bois Sauvage, Mississippi and brave open reading is required.

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As a definite Jesmyn Ward fan, I was glad to receive a copy of this book. The Mississippi deep south is the home of twins Joshua and Christophe, raised by their grandmother. Both are looking for jobs after graduation, but the courses open to each are different. Sensitive look at poverty and the roads we must travel through life.

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This is Jesmyn Ward's first book, re-released now that she is much more well-known than before, including two National Book Awards. This is her third trip to Bois Sauvage, modeled after her Mississippi home town, so it's a familiar culture by now if you've read her other work.

Ward creates such strong vivid characters, and such a deep emotional life for them. While her subject matter is intense and often hard to take in, you still root for her characters to triumph, as she has a way of making them relatable, despite some significant differences in life experience.

Ward has become one of my favorite authors, and going back to read everything she's written is definitely worth it. I missed "Men We Reaped" along the way, so that's next. A must-read if you can't get enough of Jesmyn Ward's talent -- a category in which I happily place myself. And it's a great selection for Black History Month (or any time of year.)

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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Such a talented writer. Wonderful story so well told. Read it, read it, read it!

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First published in 2008; reprint edition published by Scribner on January 16, 2018

Where the Line Bleeds is Jesmyn Ward’s first novel, and the first of three that are set in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. Like the generations before them, Joshua and Christophe DeLisle have grown up in Bois Sauvage. Their mother left her twins when they were five to search for a better life in Atlanta, but she shows up occasionally to add a dysfunctional element to the family story. The twins haven’t seen much of their drug-addicted father, but he’s released from prison and makes a sudden appearance midway through the novel. The twins still live with their grandmother, Ma-Mee, and they have no plan to leave the only place that feels like home.

Joshua and Christophe graduate in the summer of 2005 and begin to look for work, applying at fast food restaurants and Wal-Mart and Piggly Wiggly. When Joshua gets a job at the docks and Christophe doesn’t, Christophe faces a difficult choice about his future.

Some of the novel’s dramatic tension comes from the relationship that the twins have with the father and mother, but most of the story’s interest results from uncertainty about the twins’ ability to remain close to each other as they confront their individual problems. Issues of conflict involve a woman who seems to take an interest in both brothers, and a well-meaning cousin who helps Christophe earn money in a way that displeases Joshua.

Issues of race lurk in the background (faded David Duke signs send a deliberate message to blacks about the racist intent of property owners), but the novel is not explicitly about race. It is about the strength of family ties as two young men struggle with hardship and other issues, some financial and others familial. Where the Line Bleeds is also about survival. Both Joshua and Christophe are challenged in many ways following their graduation. How they deal with those challenges will determine whether their lives move forward.

Dialect and atmospheric descriptions of food and music create a strong sense of culture and place. Jesmyn Ward’s prose is smooth and graceful, but not flashy. She avoids literary trickery and lets the story tell itself. The novel derives its power from its simplicity. The truth it tells about family as a counterweight to poverty and hate is timeless.

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Ward is a force to be reckoned with, a literary power house whose books everyone should read. I read the third book in this trilogy, the National Book Award winning Sing, Unburied, Sing last summer, and then I knew I had to read everything else she had ever written. When I saw that this title, the first in the same trilogy, was being released again and that review copies were available, it seemed like Christmas. Many thanks to Net Galley and Scribner. This book was released again last week and is now for sale.

Twins Christophe and Joshua are graduating from high school, exuberant and full of plans for the future. The sole source of tension, a longstanding one that is integral to their deepest senses of self, is whether their mother, Cille, will put in an appearance. She lives in Atlanta, but she might come home to see them walk. Then again, she might not. They assure each other that really, only Ma-mee matters. Ma-mee is their grandmother, but she is the one that raised them since they were tiny; in fact, their grandmother really wanted them, and their mother really didn’t.

When their graduation present arrives—a used but still nice car for the two of them to share—they snicker to one another and say this means Cille isn’t coming. She’s done with them for sure now, bought her way out of a personal appearance. But Joshua still hopes; Joshua still longs for her.

Their father, Samuel, lives locally, and it is at him their anger is unequivocally directed. Known as the Sandman, he is beneath the contempt of even the most humble local citizens, a meth addict with a mouth full of rotting teeth that will do anything, no matter how humiliating or unprincipled, for even the smallest sum of drug money. Samuel has never pitched in a dime to help Ma-mee raise them, but now that they are adults—at least officially—he has come sniffing around. The twins’ rage toward him is measureless.

The thing that makes this story so visceral, so moving, and so deeply absorbing is the character development and the complexity of the relationships between and among the twins and the two women. Cille’s insensitivity makes me punch my pillow a couple of times. Can she not see how little food they have, despite their proud claim to be fine, just fine? Every gesture, every word is weighted with meaning. No statement, no financial transaction, no arrival or departure is without weight. The blues festival Cille has planned to attend as part of her vacation—to which the twins are of course not invited—and the money carelessly dropped on a rental car could go so much farther to help her elderly mother, who is legally blind now, but instead she leaves Ma-mee to her eighteen year old sons to care for. They both assume they will be able to get jobs once they have high school diplomas; they have no police record, and they’re not too proud to apply at fast food outlets and other retail locations.

The best jobs to be had are on the docks, but not everyone can get one. Their cousin observes, “Everybody and they mama want a job at the pier and the shipyard. Everybody want a job down there can’t get one.”

And so “reality [rolled] over them like an opaque fog…” Joshua, the lighter of the twins, is hired, but Christophe can’t get a job there or anywhere else. And so a new division is born, and a new source of tension develops. Joshua feels guilty, apologetic, and yet as time goes on, as he sweats for long hours in the Mississippi summer sun carrying chicken guts and who knows what else, his brother absents himself and comes home high; he sleeps into the day, and sometimes shows up late to pick Joshua up from work. He’s given in to his cousin’s invitation to deal drugs, and that puts everyone at risk.
Over and again, I can see that the twins are still children. Young men don’t grow up quickly anymore. They are children emotionally and developmentally until their mid-twenties, and yet this burden is Joshua and Christopher’s to carry; the choices they make are not the choices of criminals or saints, but the choices of children. Yet they carry the burdens of men, and they are aware this is because of the defection of their mother.

Ward’s more recent work is even better written than this one, and yet it’s harsher, too; I had to put it down from time to time, because it was getting dark out there. This story in contrast is one I could read for hours on end, and I did. There’s violence aplenty as well as tragedy, but this is a reality I can look at without flinching, and that’s worth a great deal too.

Highly recommended to those that love outstanding literary fiction, African-American fiction, Southern fiction, and family stories.

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This is the story of twin boys growing up in rural southern Mississippi. Joshua and Christophe are being raised by their blind grandmother. Their mother is in an out a picture. The story starts on the day of their high school graduation. Times are tough and it’s very difficult for them to find jobs after graduation. Joshua finds employment on the docks. Christophe, however, has turned to selling drugs. Ultimately, this book is about the choices the boys make and the consequences of their actions — Kind of a good twin/bad twin fable.

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A rich, unflinching novel both in character and prose, Jesmyn Ward's Where the Line Bleeds is an unforgettable story of twin brothers navigating the post-high school life, balancing job-seeking, familial ties, and obligation with an utterly believable and heartbreaking mix of temptation and monotony, hope and fatalism. A devastatingly beautiful story by a powerhouse writer.

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It's no surprise Jesmyn Ward's first novel is catching some attention, after two National Book Award wins her star has definitely risen since the first printing of Where the Line Bleeds. The new cover is an improvement and goes very well with the covers of Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing. Where the Line Bleeds shares much in common with her other two fiction titles, such as the southern small town setting, and characters who struggle in life. This novel features twin teenage boys, abandoned by their mother and raised by their grandmother. It follows the boys as they graduate from high school and struggle to find their place in the world. Ward's signature gorgeous sentences are present, transporting you to Mississippi's Gulf Coast, so much you can almost feel the heat. This novel is not quite as intriguing as her other two, as it starts very slow and the plot didn't hold my attention. Despite this, it's still a must-read for fans of Jesmyn Ward.

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Really touching story of brotherhood, but not the easiest book to read.

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