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“The novel’s power comes from the dread of the
approaching storm and a pair of violent climaxes.”
— Wall Street Journal
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“A taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and
voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it’s an ancient,
archetypal tale.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“The first great novel about Katrina.”
— Boston Globe
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“The narrator’s voice sparks with beauty as it
urges the reader through this moving story set in the shadow of Katrina.”
— Huffington Post
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“Without a hint of pretention, in the simple lives of these poor people living
among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation
of classical tragedy.”
— Washington Post
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“Ward’s redolent prose conjures the magic and
menace of the southern landscape.”
— Dallas Morning News
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“Salvage the Bones
is an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor…We
are immersed in Esch’s world, a world in which birth and death nestle close,
where there is little safety except that which the siblings create for each
other. That close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn
with complexities and detail.”
— Los Angeles Times
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“A searing, understated, and big-hearted novel.”
— Salon
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“[Salvage
the Bones] is uncompromising and frank, showing both beauty and violence,
poverty and resilience, in a powerful and poetic voice.”
— Sun Herald
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“Few works of fiction can capture the
heart-wrenching emotions attached to a natural disaster, and fewer still can do
it in a way that seems palpable and fresh…[Salvage
the Bones] accomplishes this feat, and then some…From beginning to end,
Jesmyn flirts with perfection in this stunning second novel, and the reader is
rewarded for it.”
— Free Lance-Star
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“A pitch-perfect account of struggle and community
in the rural South…Though the characters in Salvage
the Bones face down Hurricane Katrina, the story isn’t really about the
storm. It’s about people facing challenges, and how they band together to
overcome adversity.”
— BookPage
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“With her tough, tense, and taut tale of one
rural family’s bitter and bloody fight for survival in the days leading up to
Hurricane Katrina, [Ward] has secured herself a place among such other great
Southern writers as Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, and William Faulkner. Ward’s
electrifying, exhilarating, edge-of-your-seat second novel, Salvage the Bones, takes us into the naked
heart of one Southern family struggling for both survival and identity. With
prose both powerful and poetic, Ward has imagined an unforgettable family.”
— Cincinnati CityBeat
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“Without a false note…A superbly realized work
of fiction that, while Southern to the bone, transcends its region to become
universal.”
— Kirkus Review (starred review)
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“Ward uses fearless, toughly lyrical language to
convey this family’s close-knit tenderness [and] the sheer bloody-minded
difficulty of rural African American life…It’s an eye-opening heartbreaker that
ends in hope…You owe it to yourself to read this book.”
— Library Journal (starred review)
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“From its lyrical yet visceral first scene, this
novel had me, and I hardly dared to put it down for fear a spell might be
broken. But it never was or will be; such are the gifts of this writer.”
— Laura Kasischke, author of In a Perfect World
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“Jesmyn Ward has claimed her place both as a
contemporary witness of life in the rural south and as a descendant of its
great originals.”
— Nicholas Delbanco, author of Sherbrookes and Lastingness: The Art of Old Age
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“A timeless tale of a family that regains its humanity in
the face of incalculable loss.”
— Atlanta Journal-Constitution