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The Erie Reader Book Club: January 2025 Selection
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
January 13, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Erin Phillips
To correspond with our Best of Erie issue, the Erie Reader Book Club will read the work of two time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward with her novel about rural poverty in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, Salvage the Bones.
SUNDAY, JAN. 26
For the month of January, the Erie Reader Book Club has chosen to read Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Because it is the Reader's Best of Erie issue, the group decided to choose a book has received the National Book Award. Jesmyn Ward has actually won two National Book Awards: Salvage the Bones was first – awarded in 2011 followed by Sing, Unburied, Sing in 2017. These awards give her the distinction of being the first woman and first Black American to win two National Book Awards for Fiction.
Salvage the Bones follows the story of one family, living in poverty on land with a deep family history that is described as "The Pit" in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, in the 12 days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. The protagonist, 15 year old Esch, is "motherless among men," with three brothers, and the story is told from her perspective, both in the current timeline as well as through memory flashbacks. Their life is rough with a hard-drinking father, who means well and tries to prepare for the incoming storm, although in bizarre and unorganized ways. Esch has just realized that she is pregnant while her brother Skeetah is tending to a litter of puppies whose survival is doomed from the start. The story unfolds as the threat of the incoming storm increases.
Described as "a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory and real." This book is the kind that is hard to read in the spiritual sense, but one that can't be put down in the literary sense. While many scenes are upsetting, the reality, history, and poetry of the book make it one that will have readers continuing to think about it long after the last page is turned.
The Erie Reader Book Club is always open to new members.
1 p.m. // Werner Books and Coffee, 3608 Liberty St. // Free to join, cost of book not included // For more info: wernerbooks.com