This is my first 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 of such 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 up right into the hearts of her flawed yet fragile and human characters. The book is brutal at times but I adored it.

Sadly I am having to DNF this book, at least for now. The story really interests me but I cannot get my head around her writing style. I know that many people enjoy her books so I’m not gong to dismiss this completely but I don’t think it’s for me.

We all remember Hurricane Katarina and the floods and devastation it caused around New Orleans. This novel takes us into the eye of that storm by depicting its terrible impact on one poor black family in particular. Tough love sums up how this family survives but there is also an over-arching tenderness portrayed by Skeetah's utter devotion to his "fighting" dog, China. The care and love he lavishes on China as she produces her litter is incredibly moving contrasting vividly with the harshness shown to his sister by Manny, her lover. Ultimately this is a novel that confirms love can conquer anything - even Hurricane Katarina.

I LOVED Sing Unburied Sing so I was so excited to be approved for this. Another incredible feat of writing from Jesmyn Ward.

Salvage the Bones is an earlier Ward novel (you may know her for Sing Unburied Sing) and oh boy I loved it fiercely -like felt all the emotions in my bones fiercely. This is a Katrina novel and it captures terror and cyclical poverty brutally in a way that you could never ignore.

Poverty and its impact on a family from a fictional town in the Deep South becomes clear through the narration of the main character Esch. Esch has a father who spends a lot of time drunk and worrying about the threat of hurricanes, in this case Hurricane Katrina. She has two older brothers and one much younger and they all work together to keep things ticking over as best they can in order to survive. Skeetah is obsessed with his pitbull, China, and Randall seems to do a lot to help with the running of the house. The younger brother, nicknamed Junior was a late addition to the family and their mother died shortly after he was born. Esch finds out she is pregnant early on in the book and you are taken on the journey with her. The emotional journey of trying to keep it hidden but still loving the person responsible and wondering what people will say, and also the physical journey of sickness, tiredness and coping with her changing shape. The descriptions of the hurricane when it arrives are both real and terrifying. There are some beautiful, but brutal descriptions and it is a bit of an emotional rollercoaster but I can definitely recommend it. Thank you to Net Galley and Bloomsbury publishing for an ARC.

A beautifully written , hard hitting look at poverty around the time of Hurricane Katrina. This is life stripped down and raw with no happy endings. The dog fighting scenes were painful to read. Overall, this book did not make me feel good, but it was a good book.

Having read Sing, Unburied, Sing and falling completely in love with Jesmyn Ward's writing I was thrilled to receive a copy of Salvage the Bones from NetGalley. This book was powerful and raw with a 15 year old narrator who is struggling with poverty, grief and now pregnancy. It is brutal at times, and uncomfortable to read but Ward's writing is so compelling that you can't put it down.. If you have read Sing, Unburied, Sing you will know that Ward excels at characterisation (if you haven't then read that next) and it's clear that this has been a strong point throughout her career. There are no 'background' characters in this novel because even the minor characters are brimming with personality and you get the feeling that even when the book is closed the characters are still going on with their lives. Would recommend this book.

After reading (and adoring) Sing, Unburied, Sing, Ward became an author who I will buy without even reading the blurb. Unsurprisingly, Salvage The Bones is another masterful, harrowing and sharply written novel from Ward. I cannot wait to see what she writes next!

I found Salvage the bones a hard book to get through. Firstly because of the on-going landscape descriptions , sometimes I skipped through a few pages and found the author was still describing the same thing. Secondly the few disturbing scenes of dog abuse, dog fighting and dog neglect. It did add substance to the story but being the biggest dog lover it was extremely difficult to stomach. Also as much as the story was about the characters rather than a plot itself, it could of had just a little more drama and excitement. It was extremely slow to build up and finally feel the way I felt for the characters.

With so many new releases each year, it’s all too easy for books to get buried in the sands of time. Salvage the Bones deserves to be unburied. 15-year-old Esch lives with her three brothers, her alcoholic father, and the memory of her mother, in a crumbling shack in Mississippi. Hurricane Katrina is on the way, and the family is woefully unprepared. If you’re a fan of Alice Walker or Harper Lee, and love getting lost in a devastatingly beautiful read, this one is for you.

A very different read. Very compact in that it's set over a period of 12 days up to and including Hurricane Katrina and the devasting effects. Each chapter is a vignette, most of which work well. Overall it's about human endurance in the face of tragedy. I mostly joyed it,but found it difficult to engage with the narrative style.

I really wanted to love Salvage the Bones, but I found it hard to even like it. It is without doubt beautifully written, but the endless metaphors and similes grow tiresome and I found myself re-reading parts so I could understand what exactly the author was referring to. Ultimately this book is a depressing look at what it is to be poor in America in the forgotten towns, it isn’t really about much else.

This is a beautifully written book: lyrical, haunting and it doesn't pull it's punches. There were moments when I didn't really want to read with my eyes open (the dog fight - I found that very distressing), but this family had me in its grip from start to finish. I loved how 'together' they were (the siblings, anyway), how they all fought to survive, even down to the dog, China and her puppies.
You know hurricane Katrina is coming, but when it arrives in all it's visceral fury, I was truly terrified for them.
I can see why this has won awards. I loved the writing style. I'm looking forward to reading more books by Ward.

Bois Sauvage is a small town in Mississippi where rednecks and poor blacks live on opposite sides of the centre. Esch is fourteen and lives with her father and brothers in a decaying house set amongst the detritus of their lives. Esch is pregnant, her brother is obsessed by his fighting dog and her father is predicting a hurricane will hit the area. During the build-up to Hurricane Katrine lives are laid bare.

This is a heart-rending tale of rural poverty and the way that lives are moulded by need. Katrina is both a metaphor and change agent in their lives. The writing is emotive and the story desperately sad.

3.5★
“. . . he wanted the other me. The pulpy ripe heart. The sticky heart the boys saw through my boyish frame, my dark skin, my plain face. . . . I’d let boys have it because for a moment, I was Psyche or Eurydice or Daphne. I was beloved.”

Home is on land they call the Pit outside the fictional Mississippi coastal town of Bois Sauvage. Esch’s family is poor, rough, and dirty.

She loves mythology and escapes by reading and imagining. She tells us her first time having sex was when she was twelve. She’s now about 16, and there is a collection of older boys who wander in and out of the story, a couple of whom slept with her in the beginning but whom she’s now rejected in favour of the one she has a crush on, Manny. He’s tossing a basketball outside with her brother.

“I wondered if Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking. The insects singing as they ring the red dirt yard, the bouncing ball, Daddy’s blues coming from his truck radio, they all called me out the door.”

Manny is a cad of the first order – we don’t like him. He lives with his girlfriend, but Esch is always handy for a secret quickie. She is determined to get him to kiss her and show some affection.

I kept being reminded of a cartoon I saw once, where one girl says to another, “Your boyfriend takes advantage of you. Why do you put up with it?” The other replies “At least he chooses me to take advantage of.”

Esch values herself not at all. She tells us about her brothers, her father, her late mother, her grandparents. We see her only through her telling.

Her mother died having her little brother, and her father doesn’t really know what to do with her. She’s closest to Skeetah, the older brother who is totally devoted to his vicious (except to him) fighting bitch, China, and later to her puppies. People and clothes are filthy, sweaty, smelly. Unpleasant, yes, but real and true.

Esch kept wandering back down sidetracks to tell us about memories or fill us in on background, and I got impatient. It was her escape, no doubt, but I was worrying along with her father about the hurricane warnings!

I also found myself beginning to skim long sections where the boys are playing basketball or the dogs are fighting, and I mean FIGHTING.

The best part was the hurricane – both horrific and terrific. That was absolutely compelling and page-turning. There’s no doubt Ward can write and will continue to win awards.

I particularly enjoyed a section after the story finished which included an interview with her from NPR's All Things Considered (November 17, 2011) about her own experience with Hurricane Katrina after having been told so many times about her parents’ experience with Hurricane Camille in 1969.

“For my parents, the storm was called Camille, and on August 17, 1969, it made landfall.
. . .
The wind sounded like a train , my mother said every time she told me the story, and even though the metaphor made sense, I couldn’t hear it.
. . .
My storm was Katrina.
. . .
The sky turned orange and the wind sounded like fighter jets. So that’s what my mother meant: I understood then how that hurricane, like Camille, had unmade the world, tree by water by house by person. Even in language, it reduced us to improbable metaphor.”

No wonder she writes a good (bad) storm. Terrifying. I enjoyed her recent novel more, Sing, Unburied, Sing (which I also reviewed.

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing for the review copy from which I’ve quoted (so something may have changed).

A thoroughly engaging story of a family living in poverty set against the backdrop of the impending Hurricane Katrina. The narrator is teenaged Esch, who lives with her brothers and father in the rural and arid Bois Sauvage and struggles to find her place in the largely masculine group surrounding her. I loved the writing in this book even though at times it made for difficult reading, especially the raw depictions of dog fighting and then the hurricane at the end of the book. I look forward to reading more by the same author.

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy of this book. The harsh realities of life before during and after Hurricane Katrina are depicted in this novel. Esch's father is struggling to bring up his family on his own as best as he can. I have read many books on Katrina but this was a memorable depiction.

3.5 stars

Slow build up of tension from various factors,all coming to an abrupt head with the arrival of hurricane Katrina... when everything then felt frantic.
Ward writes well... very well.

Beautifully written but harrowing. What hard lives these people led before Katrina came and made things even worse. Amazing description, like being in the hurricane myself - terrible experience.