I reviewed Jesmyn Ward's debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds for Belletrista's Issue 2, and ever since then I've been looking forward to reading her second. Salvage the Bones was worth the wait.

The good news doesn't stop there; Ward takes us back to somewhere I really wanted to go—Bois Sauvage, the small, poor, mainly black town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast which she introduced us to in her first novel, and which is a fictional version of her own home town. She's not just using the location again; it's the same community, the same grinding poverty, seen through someone else's eyes this time. Whilst the main characters, Esch and her family, are different, some of the secondary characters reappear—and I was delighted that Joshua and Cristophe, the twins from Where the Line Bleeds, get a mention right at the end.

The novel covers a period of just over a week in the lives of fourteen-year old Esch and her family—brothers Skeetah, Randall and Junior, and their father (their mother died giving birth to Junior). Not just any week, though, for it's the few days immediately before, the day of, and the day after Hurricane Katrina. The storm is forecast from the start of the book, and the family starts preparations, as if for any old tropical storm. The forecasts worsen, and the storm becomes a hurricane, and is given a name—a name that means something to the reader, but not to the characters, not yet. The sense of foreboding hangs heavy over everything Esch and her family do, because unlike them we know what's going to happen.

The horrible feeling that a catastrophe is inevitable, that nature will take its course come what may, is mirrored in Esch's discovery in the first few pages that she is pregnant. She tells nobody and tries to turn a blind eye, but here too the reader knows there's no way out for this poor motherless teenager who escapes from her life of poverty by reading Greek myths under the covers.

As with the first novel, the best thing about Salvage the Bones is the characters. They're people I don't know at all—what do they matter to me? Esch and her brothers, going about their miserable lives in their dilapidated house and their yard littered with scrapped cars; Esch, who's only fourteen but has already had sex with countless boys, because it's easier to give them what they want than say no; Skeetah, obsessed with his pit-bull China, whose pups, when he sells them, will be the door to a better life for him; Randall, desperately hoping for a basketball scholarship to lift him above all this; their good-for-nothing drunkard of a father. And yet…Ward has a way with her characters which makes them get right under your skin, so that even when you think you don't care, you realize that you can't get them out of your head.

Jesmyn Ward, more from Bois Sauvage, please!