There are no options available to them, no choice in any matter, nothing more than either submit or not to what life offers them, which is not much. This is a bunch that seems stoic and strong, but they may just as easily be resigned to the forces of fate. But it’s also the universal story of familial love the siblings constantly scuffle, scrape, steal and sacrifice for each other, making beauty co-exist with the ugly. This is a story that is hurtful to read, and difficult to comprehend in that it’s so far out of our focus of comfortable existence. Sometime after that, Esch, a 15 year old motherless girl living in a male-populated household, realises that she’s going to be a mother herself and that the father of the baby won’t even look at her.Įsch lives with her three brothers and a mostly absent father in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, a town seemingly at the edge of the world in a poor, backward community, a dilapidated home with contaminated water supply and Top Ramen as the only food, brutal dog fights and a sweltering weather. The novel opens with the family dog, China giving birth to her puppies in a detailed, graphic, prolonged sequence. Using elements of the weather woven in with the myth of Medea, Jesmyn Ward tells a gripping story of a troubled family’s attempts of preparation and then at survival in the days previous to and just after Hurricane Katrina.
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