appeared in Breakwater Review and SmokeLong Quarterly, have been included in the Best Microfiction anthology, and have been longlisted for the Disquiet International Literary Prize.
At Electric Lit Markland tagged seven books in which "we see a variety of brothers and permutations of this thorny relationship—some younger brothers who look up to the older, some who want nothing to do with them, all inextricably bonded to a person who understands them (or doesn’t) like no one else in the world." One title on the list:
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn WardRead about the other books on the list.
Salvage the Bones follows siblings Randall, Skeetah, Esch, and Junior as they prepare for Hurricane Katrina in their rural Mississippi town. Although thenovel juggles multiple threads, including the coming storm and Esch’s unexpected pregnancy, one of the most compelling arcs for me centers on Skeetah—the second son—and his place within the family. While his older brother Randall is a talented basketball player whose skill offers a possible route out of their town, Skeetah devotes himself to a completely different path with the same intensity: pitbull fighting. With the two, Ward captures the subtle tension that can exist between younger and older brothers—less an outright, declared rivalry than an unspoken attempt by the younger brother to carve out a unique identity for himself. The result is an understated but no less powerful example of how birth order can shape the identities of brothers themselves.
Salvage the Bones is among Bonnie Kistler's five novels that use hurricanes to heighten the drama, Kai Harris's six top portrayals of Black girlhood in fiction, Christine Hume's ten top feminist retellings of mythology, Michelle Sacks's five books with complex and credible child narrators, Amy Brady's seven books that provocatively tackle climate change, Jodi Picoult's six recommended books, Peggy Frew's ten top books about "bad" mothers, and Jenny Shanks's five least supervised children in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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