- Paperback: 230 pages
- Publisher: Agate Bolden (Nov 1 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1932841385
- ISBN-13: 978-1932841381
- Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 14.7 x 2.3 cm
- Shipping Weight: 363 g
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
"Starkly beautiful debut...A fresh new voice in American literature." --"Publishers Weekly"
"Lushly descriptive prose...with stunning precision. Her prodigious talent and fearless portrayal of a world too often overlooked make her novel a powerful choice for our seventeenth "Essence" Book Club Recommended Read." --"Essence"
"I feel like I have read the debut work of the next Faulkner, or Capote, or O'Connor, a great Southern writer whom my children might some day read in their college classes." --Kenneth Jones, "Oxford Eagel"
"A richly textured tale...like the best fiction, [it] creates its own world." --Susan Larson, "New Orleans Times-Picayune"
"A resonant novel for any reader." --"Booklist"
"Jesmyn Ward's debut novel immediately sets her apart as a young novelist to watch closely." --Daniel Van Mieghem, "Literary Fiction Review"
"An emotionally honest snapshot of an overlooked America: small-town, economically stagnant and black." --Williami
"Lushly descriptive prose...with stunning precision. Her prodigious talent and fearless portrayal of a world too often overlooked make her novel a powerful choice for our seventeenth "Essence" Book Club Recommended Read." --"Essence"
"I feel like I have read the debut work of the next Faulkner, or Capote, or O'Connor, a great Southern writer whom my children might some day read in their college classes." --Kenneth Jones, "Oxford Eagel"
"A richly textured tale...like the best fiction, [it] creates its own world." --Susan Larson, "New Orleans Times-Picayune"
"A resonant novel for any reader." --"Booklist"
"Jesmyn Ward's debut novel immediately sets her apart as a young novelist to watch closely." --Daniel Van Mieghem, "Literary Fiction Review"
"An emotionally honest snapshot of an overlooked America: small-town, economically stagnant and black." --Williami
Product Description
Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a large extended family in a rural town on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. They've just finished high school and need to find jobs, but in a failing post-Katrina economy, it's not easy. Joshua gets work on the docks, but Christophe's not so lucky. Desperate to alleviate the family's poverty, he starts to sell drugs. He can hide it from his grandmother but not his twin, and the two grow increasingly estranged. Christophe's downward spiral is accelerated first by crack, then by the reappearance of the twins' parents: Cille, who abandoned them, and Sandman, a creepy, predatory addict. Sandman taunts Christophe, eventually provoking a shocking confrontation that will ultimately damn or save both twins. Ward inhabits these characters, and this world -- black Creole, poor, and drug-riddled, yet shored by family and community-- to a rare degree, without a trace of irony or distance.
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Customer Reviews
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.4 out of 5 stars (31 customer reviews)
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Absorbing and Gritty Portrait, Oct 28 2008
By Adam Rust "a_rust" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Where the Line Bleeds (Paperback)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
I really enjoyed Where the Line Bleeds. This book is about choices made growing up in a poor part of America. Christophe and Joshua are fraternal twins, fresh out of high school. When the story opens, they are ready to seek jobs. The future is unclear, if wide open.
They are surrounded with family members whose own lives are either guideposts or hazards. Their father, Sandman, is largely absent because of addiction to drugs. Their mother has left for Atlanta and a series of decent jobs working retail. She provides the brothers with material needs, but she is woefully absent as a caregiver.
Instead, the twins are really cared for by their grandmother, Ma-Mee, and a cousin, Dunny.
Sandman, in particular, is a strong character. Easily he is one of the most pitiable figures in a book that I have read in a long time. For the author to make a person who is an absentee father and an addict into such a person takes a lot of doing. He is a ghost to the reader for a while, but by the end, I felt bad for him.
This book has a strong sense of place. It is set in a small town on the shore line of the Mississippi River. There is not a lot of opportunity in Bois Sauvage, or even in its sister community of St. Catherine's, where the white families live. The soil is full of clay. You need 10 acres to grow enough, so back when it was an agricultural community for African-Americans retreating from New Orleans, the people settled in a very spread out fashion. It is after Katrina. The economy is limited. The port has good jobs. Most jobs are in gas stations or fast food, though.
It was that sense of place that made me like this book so much. There is a lot of detail here that testifies to a way of life: what to get at the store if you want to boil shrimp, the code of conduct among kids playing pick-up basketball, the joy of wearing a nice outfit on the Fourth of July.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
One shared history, two paths to the future, Sep 25 2008
By BMAR - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Where the Line Bleeds (Paperback)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
"Where the Line Bleeds" is an intriguing story that looks at fraternal twin brothers, who though they have shared a womb, share very little besides that. Joshua and Christopher pursue drastically different paths - one a straight-laced, hard worker; the other making his mark on the street.
These brothers respond extremely differently to a life without the loving guidance of a mother or father. The author presents may sides to the tale, making it an intriguing read with a little something for many readers.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Languid, atmospheric tale of twins searching for adulthood, Oct 27 2008
By Arts Lover Karen - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Where the Line Bleeds (Paperback)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
Fraternal twins Christophe and Joshua struggle toward adulthood following their high school graduation. The Mississippi Gulf-Coast setting and limited economic opportunities are vividly drawn here, immersing the reader thoroughly in the boys' world and their difficult choices.
So alike when the story begins, the brothers soon begin drifting apart when one finds a job and the other doesn't. Their differences expand as time goes on. Drug-related opportunities and downfalls are always lurking at the edges of this story; the boys' father is a local crackhead known as "Sandman," who's had no more a part in raising them than their self-centered mother (who ran off to Atlanta when the boys were five).
The twins are tied to the area by loyalty to the grandmother who raised them; her blindness and diabetes mean she needs them as they needed her all those years before. They cannot leave her or each other, and being trapped changes which choices still remain.
The version I read was pre-release, with occasional typos. That doesn't explain the roughness of some of the point-of-view shifts, however, the sense of which persists even though the POV is resolved. The narration moves between all three main characters, primarily the twins, but it was the grandmother's character whose perspective was most unexpected and refreshing, particularly her memories of her late husband.
The language and description convey real affection for this Creole region and its people, and an understanding of the emotional prison of abandoned children who can never stop chasing the love of the parent who left them.
This,
"Ma-mee dimming like a bulb, his parents' places unknown and orbiting them like distant moons..."
is the world that awaits the boys.
This slow, rich story details how they come to deal with it.
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