Where the woods are cleared, there is red dust. Broken appliances and partially working vehicles dot the yard between their house and the decaying home where their grandparents lived chickens wander, no longer confined to an abandoned chicken coop. They live on several rural acres that belonged to their mother’s family, which once profited by using part of it as an ad-hoc dump. After her death, their father took up a diminishing cycle of odd jobs, alcohol and anger. The siblings have largely raised themselves since their mother died after giving birth to Junior, the youngest. Her desire for a relationship with him is more aspirational than realistic - their couplings are heated but passionless, and he lives with a girlfriend - but hopes, however tenuous, are the lifeline for Esch and her brothers. I feel it so strongly that I cannot imagine how Manny does not feel it, too.”Īlthough Esch has been sexually active since the age of 12, Manny, a friend of her brother’s, is the first man she’s fallen for.
“That she looked at him and felt a fire eating up through her rib cage, turning her blood to boil, evaporating hotly out of every inch of her skin. “I imagine this is the way Medea felt about Jason when she fell in love,” she thinks. It’s told by a teenage girl, Esch, whose late-summer thoughts turn to Greek myths and her neglectful lover, Manny.
“Salvage the Bones” is an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor. The result, this year, was that an under-the-radar second novel rose to the top of the pack.
In the case of the National Book Awards, five judges read 315 fiction submissions in a small window of time and choose their favorite. While major film and music awards are based on the votes of a large group - meaning there is a general consensus or popularity - book awards are frequently selected by just a few people. Now, however, this novel about a poor Mississippi family in the weeks leading up to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina has a prominent place in bookstores and boasts the gold medallion that comes with winning the 2011 National Book Award.īook awards are marvelously idiosyncratic. If it had not caught the attention of a handful of important readers, Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones” would most likely have quietly faded into obscurity many worthy books do.
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