![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Esch and her siblings, Randall, Skeetah, and Junior, have largely raised themselves after the death of their mother and their father’s subsequent slide into angry alcoholism. Set in predominantly black Bois Sauvage, a Mississippi bayou town directly in the path of Hurricane Katrina, Salvage the Bones is the story of pregnant-and-fifteen Esch Batiste and her family, alive or otherwise. Perhaps when she read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Homer’s The Odyssey, and the Biblical accounts of Job and Noah, Miller consumed them unwillingly, as limp spinach. You really think it’s any different for us than it is for you? The books might differ, but not the alchemy.” After reading Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, I can only assume that Miller places archetypes of motherhood, poverty, and survival into the obscure column. In the end, what’s any good reader really hoping for? That spark. Victor LaValle refuted Miller’s claims saying, “These five books worked some special kind of magic on us. When Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award in 2011, Salon critic Laura Miller called the award a literary equivalent of spinach: “a book that somebody else thinks you ought to read, whether you like it or not.” Miller contended that the NBA judges focused on unknown small presses and obscure aesthetic concerns, at the expense of better fiction. ![]()
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