Salvage the Bones

I learned about Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones on Goodreads and added it to my “to-read” list based 95% on the cover art.  I have found that with wine and books, if I like the label, I usually enjoy what’s inside.  This book was no exception.  This family tragedy is beautifully written, maintaining a steady pace even in chapters with more idleness than action.  Ward certainly has a way with words, expertly using an epic storm to tell the story of a broken family and the tempest building within their own walls.

The book opens with China, Skeetah’s pit bull, giving birth to her first litter.  The scene is graphic and raw on its own, but Ward masterfully mingles it with the particularly difficult birth of Junior, the youngest brother, on the last day the kids saw their mother.  Esch learns she is pregnant a few pages later.  Over the next eleven days, the father pushes the kids into preparing for the hurricane they don’t believe is coming.  As a reader, this makes you a wreck because you know going into the book that the storm would come and it would be catastrophic.  But kids are kids and their own lives were so full of turmoil that a hurricane off the coast of somewhere far away was not a priority.  Esch is keeping a big secret, Randall is focused on getting a scholarship to a basketball camp where he can impress college recruiters, Skeetah is trying to keep the puppies alive – they mean money for the family – while China returns to fighting condition, and Junior is a 7-year-old without a real parent.  Through all of this, these kids are supposed to prepare for a hurricane.  How?  The storm provides a dramatic backdrop for the stress and pain and struggles this fictional family, and too many nonfiction families, go through every day.  Hurricane Katrina was just one more thing they had to try to survive.

Salvage the Bones is heart-wrenching, powerful, and absolutely worthy of the praise and awards its received.  This book will stick with me for a long time. Some questions:

1.       Skeetah loved China like a mother loves her baby.  Her nurtured her, trained her, kept her healthy, and disciplined her when she needed it.  How could someone who loves his dog so deeply send her into a fight where she could get killed by another dog?  This book changed the way I looked at the owners of the dogs in dog fights a little bit, but I just don’t get how you can put something you love like that directly in harm’s way.

2.       What is the link between poverty and teenage pregnancy, drinking, and drug use?  The kids in this book were always making some kind of bad decision, and you hear similar stories daily.

3.       Kathryn Stockett, who wrote The Help, has gotten some flak for writing a book about black domestics because many feel a white woman could have no idea what it was like for other races to live through the 1960s.  Jesmyn Ward grew up in rural Mississippi and her family’s house flooded during Katrina, leaving them stranded in a field of tractors.  Is it necessary for a writer to have firsthand knowledge of the experience they write about?  Is Salvage the Bones a better book because Ward’s connection to it was deeper than Stockett’s?  Personally, I love both books, but I can see where the argument is valid.