Legit Lit: Salvage the Bones

Feeling down? Looking for a lift? Avoid this book, unless your lift can wait a few hundred pages. But boy, oh boy, is the lift worth the wait. Jesmyn Ward's National Book Award winner is set in a small, backwater town in Mississippi. The story begins days before Hurricane Katrina ravages the coast and ends the morning after the storm departs. Fifteen-year-old Esch is the main character and narrator. Her mother died years before and her father, though mostly well-meaning, is usually too drunk to act on his good intentions. She and her two brothers, Randall and Skeetah, struggle to care for themselves and their much-younger brother, Junior. Esch has a complicated relationship with her brothers, and with their friends, who constantly hang around their ramshackle house. She is the lone girl in a boys' world, and finds the abundance of male presence both comforting and isolating. The boys are sometimes protective and sometimes abusive, but Esch remains strong and matter-of-fact, living the only life she has ever known as best she can. She is generous to the point of personal destruction and longs for that affection to be returned.

Skeetah's pride and joy is his pit bull, China, whom he has trained to be a vicious fighter. The juxtaposition between the dog and Esch is really interesting. Both are females in a world that doesn't acknowledge them. This has made them fighters, but both can be tender to the ones they hold dear. And the boys alternately love Esch - just as Skeetah adores China - but unthinkingly trample her feelings the way Skeetah is eager to throw China into the ring at her peril.

The character development in this poetic gem is superb. I found myself effortlessly understanding people I'd have been quick to judge and was able to empathize with them even when they made poor decisions. Even Esch's father, who is at best useless and at worst a detriment to the family, turns out to be a sympathetic character, more broken by his grief over his wife's death than cruel.

Motherhood is a prevalent theme in the book. Esch and her brothers miss their mother constantly and try unsuccessfully to combine their efforts to fill her role. Junior, who never knew his mother, is obsessed by memories of her that are not his own. China is busy rearing her first litter of puppies, and Esch, to her surprise and dread, finds out early on that she herself will be a mother soon.

Salvage the Bones builds the way a storm gathers, and the climax is explosive and destructive. But, like Katrina, the irreversible flow of the plot seems to lay out hope and possibilities for rebuilding a world better than the one that was destroyed.