Name: vive's review of Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward
Item: Where the Line Bleeds
Rating: 4
Author: vive

Jesmyn Ward

"Twin brothers struggle with the responsibilities of adulthood and family in the post-Katrina Mississippi Gulf coast"--Provided by publisher.

Where the Line Bleeds

Karen Shimek

vive

I read this book because of my deep love for Ward's Sing Unburied, Sing. Her works Where the Line Bleeds, Salvage the Bones, and Sing are generally considered to be a very loose trilogy, united by themes of geography/location (rural south) and the lives of Black residents therein. 

What I love most about Where the Line Bleeds (and Sing, though I think it's more unbridled in Where the Line Bleeds) is the everydayness it depicts re: the central characters' lives, as well as Ward's focus on the characters' varying, interconnected, and conflicting relationships, especially in terms of family. The moments we're privy to as readers feel real, visceral, and lived in. It's impossible to not see these characters as anything other than real people, which I think speaks to Ward's ability to both specify and universalize at the same time--a skill many writers strive for but don't always achieve.

I also love how Ward grounds her characters in their environments and vice versa. In Where the Line Bleeds, the twins, Ma-mee, Sandman, Javon, Dunny are all Bois Sauvage and Bois Sauvage is them. They are never not described without references to the places and spaces in which they travel or the people with whom they circulate in those places and spaces. 

While it's hard for me to describe this text without comparisons to Sing (because the gravity of that novel has still not left me) I'll say that, to me, it's third-person stream of consciousness done right. Sometimes there are superfluous details, but given more than a glancing thought, it's easy to see why and how those details are necessary in their accumulation. Together, every word builds the characters' world(s) and gives readers a sense of the everydayness of lived experience and how all of these things add up to a life.

The first novel from two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward, a timeless Southern fable of brotherly love and familial conflict Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a large extended family in a rural town on Mississippi's Gulf Coast. Over the course of a single, life-changing summer, as they struggle to find work and contend with the reappearance of their parents – Cille, who left town for a better job, and Sandman, a dangerous addict – the brothers are forced into a series of decisions that will ultimately damn or save them. A delicate and closely observed portrait of fraternal love and strife and the bonds that can sustain and torment us, Where the Line Bleeds marks the beginning of Jesmyn Ward's extraordinary career in fiction.

Karen Shimek &
Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward

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Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward