Salvage the Bones
2012
The novel covers the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, narrated by Esch Batiste, a fourteen-year-old who lives in poverty with her father and three brothers and has just learned she’s pregnant. Her father, a hard drinker, is the only one who seems concerned about the approaching storm. Her brother Skeetah is consumed by his fighting pit bull, China, whose newborn puppies keep dying. To save them, Skeetah and Esch steal medicine from a white landowner’s house, and Skeetah later puts China into a dogfight. When Katrina hits, the family survives, but China is swept away in the floodwaters. Throughout, Ward draws parallels between Esch and China as mothers and ties Esch’s story to the Greek myths she studies in school.
This was a difficult read, and it took me more than a month because I kept putting it down. The dogfighting was hard to stomach. I understand the story is an important one, but I had to force myself through it. Ward’s prose is dense with stacked metaphors and similes that often felt overdone, and the pacing is slow. Nearly the whole book builds toward the storm, which arrives with only a few chapters left. Esch is the one fully drawn character, and her chapters were the strongest for me, while her father and brothers stayed thin. I can see why the book won the National Book Award, and I respect what it set out to do. It just wasn’t an enjoyable read for me.
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