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.

I wanted to like this memoir, which tells the story of a family's home in New Orleans over a period of decades before and after it is ruined by Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, the threads of the story felt too loosely tied together from the beginning. When Sarah Broom shows up in her own book (after she has introduced her grandmother's and mother's generations), the book grows more lively. Even then, however, the story feels disjointed. Broom writes about going to college but not how she got from school to Oprah's magazine. She writes about leaving the magazine to work overseas but not why she returns to the U.S. She describes working for former NOLA Mayor Ray Nagin, but glosses over her departure from that job as well. While sections of the book are elegantly written, the parts don't make up a meaningful whole.

In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant--the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah's father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.

Such an incredible story. I wholeheartedly relate to a house becoming an intricate part of a families history. an amazing story.

This was a fascinating look at 100 years of history. I loved the peek into a New Orleans that I would never have seen otherwise and which reminded me a bit of my own city of Baltimore. A great multigenerational family story.

Phew! This book that I was so anticipating was a bit of hard going for me. I like many, many others love New Orleans and have deep admiration for it’s people. I visit as often as I can. I own a wonderful library of books of all types relating to that city. Of course, as a visitor, one is not able to invite a stranger to sit right down and tell you all about your life growing up in this fabulous place. The Yellow House was a opportunity to hear such a story. Let me start with the hard stuff first. Throughout I had strong feeling of discontent and ambivalence coming from the author that I found pretty disconcerting. How cheated does she feel by her father’s death before she has a chance to know him? Is she attached to the fraying Yellow House or dislike it? Does the city of her birth call her home or is she happy to escape it? Am I and my ilk, as tourists, guilty for our embrace of the romance and magic of New Orleans given the undoubtably serious problems that exist there? The book’s detail shows that Katrina, though her family’s experience, was just as harrowing as it appeared on t.v. All of that aside, the author’s love for her family shines through. It begins with the story of two really wonderful women Grandmother Lolo and her daughter Ivory who is the mother of twelve children that she has raised in the Yellow House. Both are hardworking with a sense of grace and refinement. I enjoyed very much reading about this family.

Well cutting to the chase I really didn't like this one. I was all ready to fall in love with a nonfiction story where the author talks about her family living in New Orleans East. A place that I have never heard about. Instead the big jumps around a lot and Broom at times talks about her family as if they were these people she doesn't know. I kept getting confused everytime she talked about Simon Broom (her father) in a what I would call historical tone. Due to this I really didn't get any type of emotion from her while reading this. The book turns into something more when she recounts Katrina and how scared she was for her brothers and mother. But by then I felt myself just going through the motions to finish this one up. I ended up bouncing to other books to finish in order to just put this one aside. I started it weeks ago and just could not get into this. The ending was perplexing and read as unfinished, at least to me. There is a reason why I tend to not review memoirs. I always feel badly if I don't like the book the author puts out since then in a way that makes it seem like I dislike them. I think the only memoirs besides this one this year that I read was just Tan France's book. And reading this one reminds me why I stay away from memoirs especially when they read like this.

"The Yellow House" tells the story of Sarah Broom's family growing up in a yellow house in New Orleans East. Through a long winding road we get into Sarah's mother's family and father's family and how they ended up meeting and having I think children together. Sarah ends up being the 13th child born to her mother and father and does not get to know him since he died several months after she was born. From there we have Sarah talking about relatives, friends, her brothers, sister, her mother, etc. She sometimes will call them brother, sister, or mother or other times talk about them in a totally removed voice. Sarah tries to leave New Orleans East behind, but she feels it pull her when she goes off to places like New York. When Katrina hits she finds herself wanting to be back in the city, but she has moved on from New Orleans East to the French Quarter properly where her family does not feel as if they fit in.

The writing I thought was too technical and dry. I was glad that Broom included pictures to break up the book. At times I don't know what Broom was going for. Was she trying to write a history book or was she trying to provide commentary on New Orleans East. And sometimes she would get into crime and statics and how bad New Orleans (French Quarter) had gotten. She would jump around from paragraph to paragraph. When she gets into when she leaves the country for Burundi (I think, sorry reading these ARCS is a pain since I have a hard time trying to search later) the book turns into something else and I just scratched my head.

The flow was awful from beginning to end. I think if the book was more focused it would have resonated more. At times she seems to want to upbraid her father for not finishing the Yellow House so that the family could live there and not be ashamed of it. Other times she is angry that the family is ashamed of the house and can't have close friendships with others because of it. I just maybe went seriously and was baffled. My parents house was not a showcase and my dad was constantly knocking down a wall and we were dealing with construction here and there. I remember living with plastic hanging from the wall between the living room and entryway for about 5 years. My friends came over all of the time. So did my brothers and relatives. I guess our family just didn't care? I don't know. I think that I get the importance of owning your own home and having something that is yours and how important that is to African Americans especially when the housing market fell out and everyone owed money on a home they could no longer afford. I just wish that had been more of the story.

The setting of New Orleans East surprised me. I had no idea such a place existed. I wanted to read more of the history of that place. Too bad most of the history books I saw were just about the French Quarter.

The ending was puzzling. I don't know what Broom was going for there at all.

An interesting read about the youngest member of a large family whose lives focused around a house her mother owned for five decades. The author delves into her family history, which is fascinating reading. However, it's easy to sometimes get lost with all of the names and who is who. Over the years the house became delapitated and eventually had to be demolished after Hurricane Katrina. The house had been a focal point of the family for many years, but although it's now gone, the real anchor is the family connections among the siblings.

"The Yellow House" tells the story of a literal yellow house in New Orleans East. Author Sarah M Broom grew up in the shotgun house that was owned by her mother and became her mother's thirteenth and most unruly child.
The first part of the book tells the story of Sarah's family and how they came to live in the yellow house. The second half of the book tells of her search for identity and adventure as she tried to escape her home and eventually returned to the city where it resided.
I appreciated the book's insights into the life and culture of New Orleans during the 1900s through the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. The author also has a pleasant writing style that's easy to read. The book is a bit boring in places, though, and parts of it seem to have nothing to do with her quest for a home of her own.
Readers who like New Orleans, family histories and memoirs will like "The Yellow House." It did make me think about the lengths I would go to find a place where I truly belong.
Note: adult language,

I found the story very interesting but it was extremely hard for me to get into it. I picked it and gave up immediately several times before I forced myself to finish it. This is an ambitious book that covers generations worth of a family history in New Orleans, one of America's most fascinating cities. Behind the story of the Yellow House and its inhabitants, is a story about persistence, loyalty, and strength. I would recommend this book only to those who have a specific interest in New Orleans and/or Southern family dynamics.

Thank you to NetGalley, Grove Press, and Sarah M. Broom for allowing me to access an advance release copy in exchange for my honest review.

A personal family history which had some interesting bits, but overall the Meandering narrative and introducing many new names made the book a bit clunky at times.

A Yelow Home a home to Sarah M.Brooms family.A story of family history that takes place in the always magical city of New Orleans .Awonderfully written story of family life and the home they lived in.#netgalley#groveatlantic

I recieved a digital copy from Netgalley for my honest review. The writing was really good though I had a hard time getting into this story. A more in depth revue coming soon.