Mudbound

By Hillary Jordan,

Book cover of Mudbound

Book description

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CAREY MULLIGAN, GARRETT HEDLUND & MARY J. BLIGE

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry's love of rural life is not shared…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Mudbound as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Mudbound is about post-WWII in the Jim Crow south. It tells the stories of two returning soldiers in a muddy farm setting. I was raised on a dairy farm with plenty of mud, so I easily identified with the setting. The situation of the two men, one White, one Black, and their families' struggles, physically with the constant mud, and emotionally with the politics of both the era and the place, were graphic. It was a book that was difficult to put down and also difficult to read. In ways I was reminded of 12 Years A Slave.

Set in the Jim Crow South, Mudbound is an eloquently written bitter portrait of a poor young white man and a Black man returning to post-World War II Mississippi and the family relationship between the Black sharecroppers and the white landowner. Through clear, alternating character voices that leap off the page, the novel explores the depth of racist hate and discrimination in that time and place and the struggle for reconciliation.

From Robert's list on grand literary historical fiction.

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