Synopsis
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.
Revue de presse
"A starkly beautiful debut ... A fresh new voice in American literature."
—Publishers Weekly
"A resonant novel for any reader."
—Booklist
"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
"A promising debut."
—Kirkus Reviews
"A lyrical yet clear-eyed portrait of a rural South and an African-American reality that are rarely depicted."
—Boston Globe
"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."
—Oxford Eagle
"A richly textured tale ... like the best fiction, [it] creates its own world."
—New Orleans Times-Picayune
"Ward’s beautiful language allows the location and characters to come alive ... will appeal to teens who can see themselves here or who are interested in discovering realities far from their own lives."
—School Library Journal
"Bursting with life—joyous, loving, frustrated and furious—Where the Line Bleeds marks the forceful debut of an exceptional new talent. Jesmyn Ward's vision is at once searingly honest and sweepingly empathic. Her vibrant portrait of a Mississippi Gulf Coast town is peopled by some of the most movingly, achingly human characters I've encountered in fiction in years."
—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
"Jesmyn Ward's debut novel is eloquent in its description of young lives at risk; she's authoritative both when writing of the doomed and prospect of salvation. The lyric gifts displayed in Where The Line Bleeds are very impressive indeed, and the world evoked—the rural south, with its complex web of family devotion and betrayal—is vivid from first page to last. A major talent here."
—Nicholas Delbanco, author of Spring and Fall and The Count of Concord
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