Salvage the Bones

I love to read about people who would be called victims by many, but who prevail—not by being heroic exceptions, but by suffering deeply and struggling on, because that’s what people do.

This novel is especially good on the loyalty and love among the siblings in a motherless family. It's in the voice of a wonderful teen-age narrator who is reading mythology for her summer homework, and identifies with Medea of mythology.

The young people mostly have the big-hearted courage of survivors, and there are also all the classic narrative conflicts: people versus nature; people versus each other, people versus… show more.

Salvage the Bones was the first Jesmyn Ward book I read, and I fell for 14-year-old Esch, who loves Greek myths and a boy named Manny. Set in the days before Hurricane Katrina, Esch and her beloved brothers live young lives full of – well, full lives, that’s the point. 

Ward told the Paris Review about living through Hurricane Katrina, “I saw an entire town demolished, people fighting over water, breaking open caskets searching for something that could help them survive. I realized that if I was going to assume the responsibility of writing about my home, I needed narrative… show more.

When I read this for the second time- I again fell into the story, completely absorbed in the language and the main character, fourteen-year-old Esch.

I loved how she loved her brothers and how they loved her back in such real and relatable ways. I believed in her pregnancy and in her poverty. I felt the suspense and drama of Hurricane Katrina getting stronger and coming closer, even as the family struggled with their more everyday problems and needs. I loved the lush and vivid descriptions of nature.

I felt I was there, experiencing this with these people. This is… show more.

People’s stories show disasters’ costs better than accounting for how much money they cost or how many people died, the common metrics used in public policy, including during the pandemic. These measures miss the long histories, with disaster as one event in lives that precede it and continue after.

In her poetic novel, Jesmyn Ward details stories of a family living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the days before Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, and in its immediate aftermath. By the time the storm strikes, everything that has preceded it makes sense of the family’s being left behind with… show more.

Salvage the Bones is a deeply personal, heartbreaking story of Esch and her siblings navigating life as Hurricane Katrina approaches. But more than the chaos of nature’s fury, it is their interior lives—their day-to-day struggles absent any meaningful help from outsiders—that bring Ward’s pages to vivid life. She shows us just how complex growing up can be, especially for a child faced with bringing a new life into the world. And, yes, I’ll leave it there, exhorting you to read Salvage the Bones for more.

Jesmyn Ward’s 2011 National Book Award-winning novel captures young narrator, Esch, and her family in the moments before Hurricane Katrina strikes their home in rural Mississippi. I had never encountered a narrator with such fierceness and complexity before. Told her in poetic, vibrant prose, Esch struggles to prepare her family for the impending storm as she confronts her challenges including the realization that she might be pregnant. I don't think I’ve ever read a book that so brilliantly captured the struggle of family life and how that idea of family plays into our individual sense of survival. By the end… show more.

When I am asked whether my next book will also be true crime, I say that my wheelhouse isn’t actually true crime but stories about pregnant teenage girls. This extends to my reading material. Salvage the Bones is a heart-stopping novel about a 15-year-old girl being raised by her widowed father in small-town Mississippi. In the calm before Hurricane Katrina, Esch and her three brothers—who alternately play basketball, raise pit bulls to dogfight and get in the way—are only just getting by. But Esch has a secret, which threatens to tip her life into chaos—there’s a baby growing inside of… show more.

I read Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones in college, and I marveled over Ward’s ear for language and her attentiveness to the rich emotional lives of her character. A beautiful, big-hearted novel.