![]() ![]() The girl, 15-year-old Esch, narrates the story, beginning with the grueling birth of puppies to her brother's beloved pit bull, an event that conjures memories of her mother's home delivery and death. ![]() ![]() With neglect that amounts to abuse, the drunken father in 'Salvage the Bones' barely maintains a house for his children - three sons and a daughter - after his wife dies in the birth of the youngest. It is also the story of the heroic stand the family makes against the traumatic thing itself. Ward's novel, a 2011 National Book Award winner and the 2016 Memphis Reads selection, describes the days leading up to the deadly hurricane for a broken family living on the remote edge of a town called Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. 'Narrative ruthlessness' is what she calls her gift for creating visceral fiction from her own experiences. Her father and brother raised and sometimes fought pit bulls, and as a child she saved her own life by repeatedly punching one as it attacked her. She and her family watched from a truck in a field as the Category 5 storm devastated her area of coastal Mississippi in 2005. When Jesmyn Ward writes in 'Salvage the Bones' about the cruelty of Hurricane Katrina or the terror of a pit-bull fight, she's not relying solely on imagination. Jesmyn Ward is the author of 'Salvage the Bones,' this year's Memphis Reads title. ![]()
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