Book #20 of 2024: Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward Author Jesmyn Ward’s usual lyrical prose is on fine display in this latest novel, and it wouldn’t surprise me if other readers enjoy the surrounding work more than I have. It’s certainly a brutal read, depicting a young enslaved woman in the antebellum south who …
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Book #51 of 2022: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine This volume is an expansion of the original New York Times Magazine article that was published to honor the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to Virginia, highlighting American history through …
Book #156 of 2021: The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race edited by Jesmyn Ward Not every entry in this collection of essays and poems quite lands for me, but all told it’s a powerful reflection from various African American writers near the start of the Black Lives Matter movement and just …
Book #18 of 2019: Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward Unsurprisingly given the power of her novels, author Jesmyn Ward’s presentation of her own early life as a poor black girl in rural Mississippi during the 1980s-90s crack epidemic is equal parts insightful and gut-wrenching. Told mostly as a series of vignettes, this memoir centers …
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Book #217 of 2017: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward The prose in this novel is just as lyrically beautiful as Jesmyn Ward’s earlier Salvage the Bones, but the story is more magical realist than southern gothic, and I feel like it suffers for it. The portrait of a Mississippi family dealing with racism, poverty, …
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Book #39 of 2016: Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward A heartbreakingly visceral story about a poor black family in rural Mississippi in the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. This whole novel feels like one long in-drawn breath, as things keep getting worse for the main character and her family while you, the reader, …
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