Release Date: November 20, 2008
Some books are read in the comfort of a quiet calm. Where the Line Bleeds is not one of those books. Even though this is a book about love, devotion, caring and relationships within a family, a gnawing fear of looming disaster grips the reader from the first page; there’s an easygoing sense of the slow moving day-to-day of summer, which is deftly set against a backdrop of looming disaster. Jesmyn Ward’s debut novel immediately sets her apart as a young novelist to watch closely. Her sense of place is spot-on throughout the entire book—there is absolutely no doubt that she was paying attention as she grew up in the poor south of Gulf Coast Mississippi; she obviously loves this area and knows it and its inhabitants well.
Joshua and Christophe are fraternal twins who at the outset of the story are just graduating from high school. Their education complete, within their community they are seen as adults with adult responsibilities. They need to find jobs, start paying their own way, and take care of the grandmother who raised them. But they’re still children, lost as they struggle to make sense of the world around them, a mother who left them for a job in Atlanta, and a father who deserted them for life of drugs and prison. Both young men have good hearts, and obvious concern for each other, and their friends, and a special bond of love, devotion and respect for their grandmother.
The twins spend many days together looking for work; they fill out applications everywhere from fast-food establishments to manufacturers, both in their small town of Bois Sauvage and in all the other small towns within a twenty mile radius. Joshua is lucky when he’s hired to unload cargo at the docks on the Gulf of Mexico, yet his working causes friction between him and his brother. Christophe is unable to find work, and turns to dealing drugs as a desperate attempt to assuage his guilt for not helping his family. As the boys’ grandmother’s health gradually fails, and both the mother and father return to tiny Bois Sauvage, the tension continues to build. The confrontation at the end is as fraught with fear as it is with hope.
As I read this book, I felt a growing concern for the twins. I wanted to take them aside, counsel them, find work for Christophe. Ms. Ward has created characters who will be with me for a long time. It’s a tough world out there, and even if you try to do the right thing, it doesn’t always work out. In Where the Line Bleeds, Ms. Ward has a lot to teach us. These are things we need to know. I hope we’ll listen and learn.
Superb imagery, fully developed characters and relationships, wonderfully visual renderings of time and place—this book has it all. I fell in love with her style from the first page on.
I can hardly wait to hear more from her.
