Salvage the Bones is the second novel by author Jesmyn Ward, published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing. It tells the story of an African-American family in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina, and follows them in the aftermath of the storm. Ward grew up in Mississippi, and lived through the horrific event with her family. Ward was “dissatisfied with the way [the hurricane] had receded from public consciousness”, and was inspired to write Salvage the Bones in the years following the storm. Hurricane Katrina remains one of the most catastrophic events of the twenty-first century in America, and Salvage the Bones acts as a somber reminder of the horrifying events of 2005, while painting an intimate picture of a African-American Southern family. The first review I will be …show more content…
On Amazon, users can submit reviews and vote on other responses, so we can gain a wide perspective of what the public thinks about Ward’s writing. Amazon reviews tend to range from the overly critical to the overly positive, including those who did not actually read the book. Fifty-two percent of six hundred and eighty-five reviewers left Ward a five-star rating on the novel. The top-rated review on Amazon is from an anonymous user, but provides important insight as to what a non-professional book reviewer thinks of the novel. In this comment, the writer criticizes book reviews from the aforementioned reviewers Charles and Sehgal, noting that they ignored central theme of motherhood in the novel. The commenter says that “it is the mother force of China, the echoes and remnants of love of the children's own mother lost in childbirth, Katrina and Esch, ultimately, herself, that is the main drive in the book”. The reviewer writes entirely positive comments about the novel, analyzing the unstoppable force of motherhood that permeates every