"A taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written. It feels fresh and urgent, but it's an ancient, archetypal tale . . . Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader's expectations." - Parul Sehgal, New York Times Book Review
"Ward tells the story with a tense patience, marking day after day; when the storm comes, overturning everything, it feels like a fatal relief. At least the waiting's over.
Salvage the Bones expands our understanding of Katrina's devastation, beyond the pictures of choked rooftops in New Orleans and toward the washed-out, feral landscapes elsewhere along the coast." -
New Yorker "There's something of Faulkner to Ward's grand diction, which rolls between teenspeak . . . and the larger, incantatory rhythms of myth. She's fearless about her passion coming out purple, and for the most part the intensity of her story carries it off." -
The Paris Review "I've just read [
Salvage the Bones], and it'll be a long time before its magic wears off . . . [a] fiercely poetic novel . . . What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico . . . Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy . . . A palpable sense of desire and sorrow animates every page here . . .
Salvage the Bones has the aura of a classic about it." - Ron Charles,
the Washington Post "Strikingly beautiful, taut, relentless and, by its end, indelible . . . Ward stares down the truth . . . It's astonishingly brave." - Joan Frank,
San Francisco Chronicle "Salvage the Bones is an intense book, with powerful, direct prose that dips into poetic metaphor . . . the story is told with such immediacy and openness . . . That close-knit familial relationship is vivid and compelling, drawn with complexities and detail." -
Los Angeles Times "The novel's hugeness of heart and fierceness of family grip and hold on like Skeetah's pit bull." - Ellen Feldman,
O, the Oprah Magazine "Where the Line Bleeds was an
Essence Magazine Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award."
"A fresh new voice in American literature, Ward unflinchingly describes a world full of despair but not devoid of hope." -
PW Starred review for Where the Line Bleeds "Her prodigious talent and fearless portrayal of a world too often overlooked make her novel a powerful choice." -
Essence for Where the Line Bleeds "A richly textured tale...like the best fiction, it creates its own world." -
Susan Larson, N.O. Times-Picayune for Where the Line Bleeds "A remarkable first novel...a lyrical, clear-eyed portrait of a rural South and an African-American reality that are rarely depicted." -
Boston Globe for Where the Line Bleeds