I am adding this pair to my booktalk list for the upper grades.Īdult/High School–Fourteen-year-old Esch and her three brothers have a hardscrabble, impoverished life in the bayou. The injustice involved will strike a chord. Although the book itself does not involve teenagers, the opportunity to read one man’s experience of the days before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina in the middle of New Orleans is compelling in itself. I wish I had read it then so I might have talked with them about it. A group of students at my school read it before going on a spring break service trip to New Orleans the year before last. (In retrospect, this was not a great idea, but it’s our faculty/staff bookgroup pick for the summer and I wanted to finish before we returned to school this week.) What an incredible story. Speaking of both hurricanes, I waited out Irene at home in Brooklyn while finishing Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun last weekend. The Paris Review published an interview with the author earlier this week, covering everything from the author’s experiences during Katrina, which impelled her to write Salvage the Bones, the novel’s links to mythology and poetry, and current attitudes toward teen moms (it’s quite an interview!). Mere days after Hurricane Irene swept up the east coast, Jesmyn Ward takes us back to Hurricane Katrina.
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