Upcoming Books:
January 16
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
February 20
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
March 20
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 

"And like every good myth, at its heart, the book is salvific; it wants to teach you how to wait out the storm and swim to safety," writes Parul Sehgal in the Dec. 30, 2011, New York Times review of Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Read BExtraordinaire Blog for more reviews on our next book club selection. 

Author Quotes: “I’m a failed poet. Reading poetry helps me to see the world differently, and I try to infuse my prose with figurative language, which goes against the trend in fiction. While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.”
― Jesmyn Ward from Paris Review Interview, August 30, 2011 by Elizabeth Hoover

Author Bio:

Jesmyn Ward grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford, from 2008-2010. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her second book, Salvage the Bones. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection. Her current book is The Men We Reaped about the loss of her brother and four other men. She teaches at University of South Alabama. 

is reading Salvage the Bones  written by Jesmyn Ward for January 16.

Salvage the Bones, Ward’s second novel won the National Book Award in 2011. It is a story of a family’s terrifying experience during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Horrifying and heartbreaking, this novel draws you in to the life of a motherless girl living in a small rural town in the Mississippi bayou days before the storm strikes. Pregnant 15-year-old Esch and her family are in a fight to survive, like scenes from her older brother’s pit bull, China, in the dog fighting ring. Esch’s mother dies giving birth to her youngest brother Junior and her distraught father turns to the bottle for comfort. It is a hard scrabble life of living off of anything they can salvage.

Allusions to Greek Mythology are throughout the novel. Esch pieces together her understanding of the world through Edith Hamilton's Mythology, she is reading for school. At times, she is Medea and her baby's father is Jason. "I wonder if Medea felt this way before she walked out to meet Jason for the first time, like a hard wind come through her and set her to shaking." Or Jason is her brother, Skeetah. "Skeetah cannot leave I am his equal. Skeetah sprints faster, and when the slack in my arm is still there because I am still at his side...Is this how Medea ran with her brother, hand in hand, away from their father's hold to join the Argonauts?" Later Katrina is murderous Medea who arrives to kill the children. Like Aegeus who gives Medea a place of refuge after the storm, Big Henry provides a shelter for Esch. 

This book takes you to the margins of life and is so authentic and honest at times it is too hard to read and at the same time too hard to put down.