I loved learning about Sarah Broom's family. She is such a good story teller. I will be reading everything else she writes. It was a fascinating look into New Orleans, in a positive and negative way. Loved it. Have suggested it to so many people.

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

I enjoyed reading this memoir about Broom as well as her family. In the memoirs I have read, it is usually about the life of that particular individual, but with this one I was interested to learn the history of Broom’s family as well as the Yellow House they lived in. 

I liked the way that social determinants were intertwined into this story. It added an additional aspect that usually is not seen in memoirs. 

There were some times when I felt a bit confused as to which person was related to who, and I think that having a family tree of some sort would be helpful. 

Finally, I greatly loved hearing about Broom’s experiences abroad and getting into the work force. I am personally trying to work in similar fields as those she worked in abroad and it was fascinating to hear about it from her perspective.

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic Books for the ARC e-book.

Despite all the press about this book, I found it unengaging.  It attempts to tell the story of the United States through a family, and in that ambition, I think it fails.  The stories of the family members are individually compelling, but I was disappointed in the sum of their stories.  Perhaps my expectations were set too high.

Such a beautifully written memoir and deep meditation on home and full-hearted portrait of New Orleans. I look forward to reading much more of Broom’s work.

A supremely moving story of a place I know well, from a perspective I know less well. At every juncture, each ribbon of memory recollected here, I felt the incredible amount of consideration that Broom put into her experience, in order to relate it for others to understand. When people talk about the Water, it usually veers to one side or the other: the Before or the After. This book brings to light both sides, as well as the During, in scintillant light. Not forgetting the imperfections (a gross understatement of a word), Broom has produced a book that transcends the cult glorification of New Orleans and instead holds a city accountable for all facets of its being, for better or for worse. Thank you, NetGalley and Grove Press, for offering the opportunity to read this volume in advance of its release.

Powerful memoir about growing up impoverished in the titular yellow house in New Orleans. (This review is probably too short for NetGalley.)

This book is a powerful reflection on the injustice and destruction that Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans wreaked on a yellow house in a blighted area of the city. Broom invites the reader to become a part of her family as they navigate finding home post-Katrina after their house is destroyed by city officials. Her writing is humorous yet tender, serious yet personal.

Sarah Broom's deftly constructed memoir is a book to relish.  The history of her family is meticulously transcribed and shines a light on their intricate relationships.  You do have to have total focus when keeping track of all the details.
What's especially fascinating is how Broom weaves New Orleans and the mythic Yellow House into the pages.  It is certainly a poignant and important story.

No surprise at all that this book has won so many awards. A personal and sociological story of place and of a history that is often overlooked. Fantastic in all ways!

DNF at 10%  - I thought this was a memoir specifically about Hurricane Katrina. Turns out that's only a small portion of a long history of a family in New Orleans. While the writing is skilled, but the pace is extremely slow and I couldn't stay interested.

One of my favorite memoirs of the year! I loved that the memoir aspect was paralleled against a social history of New Orleans East, and that we got so many insights into the regional complexities. It is also so compellingly written, I found I flew through this!

Sarah M. Broom's memoir/history The Yellow House is at its best when it focuses on her family. The early chapters in particular are energetically written, as if Broom is desperate to put her ancestors' lives down on paper before her sources and research materials fade away. Adequately rendering your individual relationships with your 11 siblings, not to mention your mother, aunts, etc., on paper is no easy task, but Broom succeeds, and at under 400 pages. 

For me, the detour into Broom's time in Burundi nearly stops the book dead in its tracks. I felt it belonged in another memoir. However, reading interviews with Broom helped me understand her including this part of her life.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing an ARC in exchange for this review.

I had the feeling while reading that this book was going to be important, and was going to collect awards, and I was so glad to see one of the papers calling it "a major book." That expresses my opinion well. This is a major book. I can't believe it's a debut. Stunning.

I ran a positive wire review of the book in our 11 print sections of the Southern California News Group.

The Yellow House is the central character in this book.  The house Sarah Broom  grew up in, was destroyed in Katrina, and before and afterwards continues to be a central pole in her life.  Broom’s large and complex family with its multi-generational brothers, sisters, aunties and cousins, lived in New Orleans East.  Largely abandoned by the city government in favor of the tourist drawing French Quarter, her neighborhood was disproportionately impacted by Katrina.  While her family physically survived the hurricane and its aftermath, its effects were profound and long-lasting.

I was fascinated by this modern history of New Orleans.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom was #unputdownable for me. This memoir takes place in 1961, when widowed, Ivory Mae (Boom’s mother) buys a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. Ivory Mae remarried Simon Broom (Sarah’s father) and becomes a widow for the second time, when Simon dies six months after Sarah’s birth. Now with twelve children to raise on her own the yellow house becomes more than just a house, it become the heart and soul of this family. 

The Yellow House is a history of New Orleans as seen through one loving family. Broom weaves memories of her own extended and immediate family members and quoting them word for word, taking it as far back as her great-grandmother and her grandmother, Lolo. I loved every bit of this story, Its engrossing and funny. I promise you won’t want to put this one down. It’s a must read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

On one level, “The Yellow House” by Sarah M. Broom is the story of one house in New Orleans East and the family who made it their home for over 40 years. But it is so much more—the story of the city of New Orleans and the ways it both burrows into its residents’ souls and betrays them and their loyalty over and over again; the story of the toll poverty and racism takes on black Americans; the story of Katrina and climate change and the catastrophic results of poor urban planning. “Remembering is a chair that it is hard to sit still in,” Broom writes, and yet she does so beautifully, taking the reader back to her family’s roots in the New Orleans of the early 20th century under Jim Crow and segregation, through her mother Ivory Mae’s marriages and her siblings’ births in the 50s and 60s and the purchase of what became known as “the yellow house” in 1961. 

These early sections are necessary for placing the story of the house within the context of the family, the city, and the times—and Ivory Mae is a compelling central character—but it is when Broom’s own narrative voice and memories take over following her birth in the waning hours of 1979 that “The Yellow House” really comes into its own. Broom’s descriptions of her childhood and particularly her memories of her childhood friend, Alvin—“Our relationship is so long that I cannot remember ever first meeting. He is hide-and-go-seek in wet summer air and five-cent Laffy Taffys with knock-knock jokes on the wrapper”—are both universal and unique to her, and are particularly poignant in light of Alvin’s early death, which Broom has already noted and which give these memories the air of elegy. 

No book about New Orleans covering the year 2005 can avoid mention of Hurricane Katrina, and “The Yellow House” is no exception, as Broom describes her family’s evacuation experiences and the harrowing stories of two of her brothers who chose to ride out the storm. These passages make the horror of Katrina and the incompetence of the rescue efforts viscerally real, but what I found more powerful was the narrative of her family’s exile and displacement in the hurricane’s aftermath that begins where most Katrina narratives end. The Yellow House, and Broom’s family’s sense of place and of belonging, were additional victims of Katrina, and the city’s Road Home program—a “massive failure for most applicants, a dead end, a procedural loop, bungled and exhausting, built to tire you out and make you throw up your hands”—takes 11 years to finally settle with Ivory Mae, a final betrayal which seems a fitting place to end “The Yellow House.” 

There’s so much more in this book that I can’t encompass in a review. Read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

The beginning of The Yellow House: A Memoir takes the reader on a New Orleans map trip to find the house where the author grew up. Like someone beside you on the journey, author Sarah Broom points out landmarks and tells what happened there on the way. Even as the book has barely started, the reader is drawn into her words and feelings, anticipating all that is to come. 

Ivory Mae Broom, Sarah’s mother and a central figure in this memoir, bought a shotgun house in 1961 in what she saw as a nice neighborhood of New Orleans East. Postwar optimism and the promise of a NASA plant made the house seem like an opportune investment for her family.  Ivory Mae would be married twice to husbands that died, leaving her with the assumption that she was bad luck for those men and the decision to remain a single parent raising their twelve children. The author Sarah, born six months after her father’s death was the last child until the Yellow House took on the role of the thirteenth and most difficult child. 

The story is of house and family told with honesty. For instance, in 1994 as her grandmother’s mind faded and her brother got into addiction, “My job was to keep Grandmother inside and to keep our brother Darryl out. Grandmother couldn’t be trusted to know where she belonged. Darryl would connive and steal for crack.” The narrative could be divided into before the Water and after the Water, as she calls Katrina. 

In their first view of the yellow house post-Katrina, she says, “Birds were living in our childhood home. When we approached it with its broken-out windows, they flew away, en masse. Her record of the ensuing attempt for her family and the property to return so some sense of normality, shows the professionalism of the journalist she has become and the heartfelt personal angst of longing for that which no longer exist.

When all is said and done, two of her brothers brag that their official mail addresses still cite the location of the Yellow House although there no longer remains a 4121 Wilson mailbox that she always placed in her childhood drawings of the house. Carl promises to dig a hole and put one up.

This memoir makes personal and authentic a side of New Orleans not often seen by the tourist trade. It gives honest insight into the struggles, successes, and failures of one extended family and of the larger community as it dealt with the Water and its aftermath.

Say the words “New Orleans” to people and images of Mardi Gras, beignets, jazz, voodoo, second lines, eclectic art and Saints football immediately spring to mind. It is a city that is visited by millions of tourists a year and has been the musical and literary muse for countless artists and writers. Past the hustle and bustle of Jackson’s Cathedral and the famous French Quarter, heading out East on I-10, is a part of New Orleans that doesn’t make the travel brochures and tour bus stops. There are no great literary works to browse on the shelves in bookstores telling the stories about the area and the people that call New Orleans East home. Until now. •

Part history lesson, part memoir, 100 percent unforgettable, The Yellow House is a look at the lives of Sara Broom’s family members as well as a powerful call out of a city, state and government plagued with corruption and systemic racism. It is a story about home, identity, and family - filled with writing that alternates from a sharp, seasoned reporter to that of a woman running – seeking answers from the offices of Oprah Magazine in New York City to the mountains of Burundi after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina - attempting to place “what happened in New Orleans in a more global context to understand how loss, danger, and forced migration play out in other parts of the world.” Throughout her book, Broom has expertly managed to walk the line between investigative journalist and displaced daughter and what she has given us within the pages of her story fills a void in Southern literature that has been sorely lacking in contemporary voice. •

Huge thank you to Grove Atlantic who provided me with an ebook and Octavia Books who had early stock of this mighty work and were kind enough to ship it out to me last week.  All the Stars.

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom is a free NetGalley ebook that I read in early August.

Quite epic, well-versed and rounded story of a large family from New Orleans during the 20th century. Yet, you get the distinct feeling that this is like an enhanced photo album with inside stories and events that you’d share between cousins and siblings, and, while they’d totally get it and understand, an outside party might just nod along, not fully connected to it all.