Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is not a book that I would have picked up on my own had I not been encouraged to read it by a book club. Books like this are the reason why book clubs are amazing. You end up reading things that you never would otherwise and enjoying them.
Mudbound is mostly set on a muddy farm in the Mississippi Delta. The story is told from alternating perspectives of several of the main characters.
Mudbound makes you feel something for each other characters: interest, understanding, annoyance and hate. Hate being the big word here. A lot of the main events in this book are filled with and fueled by hate.
Laura, a city girl, is trapped on Mudbound farm. Henry, Laura's husband, is so caught up in his "I've got to have land" thoughts that he drags Laura to a country shack that doesn't even have water or electricity. Jamie, Henry's brother is a tortured veteran who comes to live on Mudbound and breathes new life into everyone there. Florence, the black woman who works as a maid for Laura, is the braves character with the straightest backbone. Hap, her husband, is a black sharecropper on Henry's land. Ronsel, Florence and Hap's son, is a decorated war veteran who befriends Jamie. These are the main characters that we see the story from their prospective. The only main character who's side of the story we don't see is Pappy, Henry and Jamie's father, a cantankerous old man whose main goal in life is to make everyone miserable in order to assume control over his life.
This is a hard book to read. The themes of hate in the old south are painful to think about especially when you think that 1946 wasn't that long ago. But it's good, really good, if you can stomach it.
The only reason why I'm giving this four stars instead of five is because while some of the characters did grow and mature, the one who I expected to mature; did not.
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