Jesmyn Ward- Is my current obsession (Where The Line Bleeds)

Hello December!

Join our December Book Club Series

Like wow, 2021 has just flew right on by and this year has been a whirlwind from me. Aside from my very busy, newly married, Mom to a student athlete with a very demanding appetite and schedule. Life is good! Very good but life is always better with a good series to snuggle up and read. December is truly the beginning of hibernation season. It’s book, mug and blanket time and per usual I am with it! This month I really had to wiggle my toes and think about what I wanted to read. Reading relaxes me it’s my cheap plane ticket with no checked baggage or carry ons and I am super excited to be able to do it. I cherish books and I love me a good consistent author!

Now my little Lit Darlings what do you know about the delicious and heavy stories of Jesmyn Ward? She is an amazing writer, the creative writing professor at Tulane and loves, lives in and writes about Mississippi. I am reading her whole entire rural Bois Sauvage series this month but I am starting with “Where The Lines Bleed”. I am captivated my friends. This series is three compelling stories of Bayou life Jesmyn Ward is nationally recognized for doing this and doing it well!

(Where The Line Bleeds Recap)

“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” - Amazon

Check out her credentials!

Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and an associate professor of English at Tulane University. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel Salvage the Bones and won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing.She also received a 2012 Alex Award for the story about familial love and community in facing Hurricane Katrina. She is the only woman and only African American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice.All three of Ward's novels are set in the fictitious Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage.

Give her all the flowers okay!

It’s Jesmyn Ward appreciation month over here at Thee Lit House! Below are the other two novels in the series! Read With Me!

Want to read along with me. Join our December Book Club Series! Buy this series online on my website at www.TheeLitHouse.com and checkout my recap podcast on the series at the end of the month!

I love books y’all!

-Tah