Salvage the Bones

Photo: Philip Friedman/Studio D

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Salvage the Bones
288 pages; Bloomsbury USA
Esch Batiste is the only female in the Pit, a hardscrabble patch of bayou country she has shared with her father and three brothers since their mother died in childbirth. "Sometimes I think [Daddy] forgets that I am a girl," she muses. But 14-year-old Esch is obviously on the cusp of womanhood; she's pregnant by Manny, a neighbor. As Hurricane Katrina gathers strength in the Gulf of Mexico, Esch's besieged, down-on-its-luck family veers toward disaster. Daddy, who is rarely around, and even more rarely sober, struggles to prepare for the storm, which the others insist will never arrive. Randall, the eldest, jumps and shoots and sweats for a basketball scholarship that hangs tantalizingly close. And Skeetah pins his dreams on his beloved China, a killer pit bull whose pups he hopes will bring cash. In the world of Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA), brutality is the way to success, and tenderness is found only in memories, which throb like the "phantom pain" Esch imagines Daddy feeling after losing three fingers in an accident. If Ward's prose is occasionally overripe, the novel's hugeness of heart and fierceness of family grip and hold on like Skeetah's pit bull.
— Ellen Feldman