Salvage The Bones Analysis

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“Salvage the Bones” is a very influential piece of modern literature which tells the story of courage, bravery, self-realization, and coming of age. This is the second novel by the renowned author Jesmyn Ward. The book was a major success and was critically acclaimed. The books success resulted in Ward receiving the National Book Award for Fiction in 2011 for her work. The story is set in the fictional town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The main character is a fifteen-year-old African American girl named Esch and her family and the various situations, struggles and emotions that they go through in the days leading up to, during, and after Hurricane Katrina.
Ward was one of the thousands of people who had to face the infamous Hurricane Katrina in the August of 2005. As a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, one can imagine that Ward must have been through a lot of traumatic and perspective-altering experiences. And she manages to do a wonderful job of incorporating a few things that she witnessed firsthand while adding the storyline of a teenage girl and her family’s struggles to capture the audiences’ attention. As one reads through the book, there is always the lingering feeling of how devastating the hurricane is going to be, and how drastically it is about to change the lives of the characters in the story. Since the story is only focused over the timespan of around a fortnight, one does not get a glimpse of the long-term effects the hurricane must have had on Esch and her

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