As summer approaches and the hot humidity creeps in with the atmospheric pressure, the tenseness of reading Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones felt all the more real and vibrant.

This is a book that opens with tension and only builds on the unease like a breath held in suspense. And that's just the human conflict before Hurricane Katrina strikes. This tale is relayed from the viewpoint of Esch - a teenage girl with three brothers, an alcoholic father, and a deceased mother - and it's easy to feel her love for her family contrasted to a terrible sense of loneliness.

Esch can be a frustrating perspective to read in that while she has a strong spirit, she allows so much to happen to her and struggles to exert much sense of agency. But she is still a child herself, so I was left feeling angry at how her family's state of poverty and society's willingness to overlook her lead to her emotional isolation. If I have learned anything about Jesmyn Ward, it is that she is quite talented at writing fully realized characters.

"The sun is bearing down on me, burning, evaporating the sweat, water, and blood from me to leave my skin, my desiccated organs, my brittle bones: my raisin of a body. If I could, I would reach inside of me and pull out my heart and that tiny wet seed that will become the baby. Let them go first so the rest won't hurt so much." (122)

It is also worth nothing the unexpected surprise of how much this book reminded me of Of Mice and Men. Now while Ward's prose could not be more different from Steinbeck's, there were a number of thematic similarities between the two works. Notably, the focus on vulnerable and imperfect characters, an exploration of the cruelty of poverty on the American family, as well as the use of animals (specifically dogs) employed as an allegory for human struggles.

In Of Mice and Men, Lenny's development is paralleled with Candy's older dog, each demonstrating how loyalty can end with the cruelest type of compassion. In Salvage the Bones, the story opens with the China birthing puppies, which is then juxtaposed to the memory of the family's deceased mother and Esch's revelation of her pregnancy. China becomes a symbol of motherhood and femininity, elements met by malignancy bred of both man and nature.

While this is all written with beautiful and visceral prose, for me this type of content is really challenging on a number of levels, specifically in terms of seeing human conflict personified in an animal that is synonymous with service and unconditional loyalty. While I am aware that this is a literary device, in many ways this comparison felt patronizing and belittling to the female characters, and not just by the male characters but by the author as well.

A lot of this comes down to personal preference, and all that said, I still enjoyed Jesmyn Ward's writing. This was my first read of one of her books and I look forward to reading her other work.