Selected Product:
| Mudbound
Hardcover
Edition: 1
Author: Hillary Jordan
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Release Date: 2008-03-04
ISBN-10: 156512569X
ISBN-13: 9781565125698
List Price: $22.95
Average Customer Rating:
  | |
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle: A Novel (Oprah Book Club #62)
ISBN-10: 0061768065
ISBN-13: 9780061768064
List Price:$25.95
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
ISBN-10: 0385340990
ISBN-13: 9780385340991
List Price:$22.00
People of the Book: A Novel
ISBN-10: 067001821X
ISBN-13: 9780670018215
List Price:$25.95
The Girl Who Stopped Swimming
ISBN-10: 0446579653
ISBN-13: 9780446579650
List Price:$23.99
The Rain Before It Falls
ISBN-10: 0307268039
ISBN-13: 9780307268037
List Price:$23.95
|
To use our price comparison to get the cheapest price, please click on the "Find the Cheapest Price" button located above for Mudbound by Hillary Jordan (ISBN-10: 156512569X, ISBN-13: 9781565125698).
At this time we have not yet written a review for Mudbound by Hillary Jordan (ISBN-10: 156512569X, ISBN-13: 9781565125698). Please continue to keep checking back to this page as we are constantly adding reviews.
Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not—charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."
A real page-turner
| Customer Rating: | | One of the best books I have read in a long time! I loved the writer's style of giving each of the characters biographical chapters, written from their own distinct perspective. An absolute must-read!! |
Mudbound leaves you spellbound!
| Customer Rating:  | "Mudbound" begins with a graveyard scene that hints of vengeance, dark secrets, and injustices buried deep in the Mississippi mud. Indeed, the "stinking and oozing" mud of the Mississippi Delta becomes a metaphor for the blind hatreds of racism, the lingering horrors of war, and hidden dreams that will ultimately nourish or destroy.
One such dreamer, Henry McAllan, uproots his family from Memphis, Tennessee and mires them in an isolated, primitive "Mudbound" shack on a cotton farm he has purchased in Mississippi. His wife Laura, a "soft, city- bred woman not meant for living on the Delta," struggles with the farm's relentless mud, countless physical hardships and Henry's sour and profoundly racist `Pappy'; she is also strongly attracted to her brother in law, Jamie, a returning GI with war demons of his own to battle.
The lives of Henry's hardworking Negro tenant farmer, Hap Jackson, his strong-willed wife, Florence and son, Ronsel, a "Black Panther" Tank Battalion war hero, become enmeshed with the McAllans.' In Ronsel, Jordan illustrates the shameful indignities Negro soldiers experienced in WWII, and the far more brutal treatment they continued to suffer at the hands of white Southerners, "locked in the imagined glory of the past, [and] scared of losing what they thought was theirs."
In six alternating voices, the McAllans and Jacksons tell their gripping story. This is a risky technique, but Jordan's shifting narrative structure creates surprisingly seamless transitions, each succeeding `voice' and chapter filling in gaps, and adding substance. Poignant moments of unexpected friendship and forgiveness barely soften the novel's inevitable explosion of violence. "Mudbound" will hold you spellbound!
(I would give 4 1/2 stars if possible...not five because Pappy is a little too one dimensional)
|
Excellent. This book will touch all your emotions!
| Customer Rating: | | This was a beautiful book. I knew it was going to be wonderful because I was just about 1/4 way done and I was already mourning it's finish - the moment I would finish the story and have to say goodbye to it's characters. There were times during this story (and bear in mind I listened to the audiobook version) that I was talking back to some of the characters in not very nice words! I became very involved in this book as it touched on many emotions, leaving each one with something learned. I loved Mudbound. |
Compelling, gripping and tragic as fierce, brave women emerge
| Customer Rating: | | The story is compelling, the plot gripping but, as a woman, it is the female characters that evoked the greatest response in me. Both Laura and Florence are strongly protective of their families, work as hard or harder than the men, and yet are able to fight for (even demand) what is morally right for their children, their neighbors (of both races), and themselves. At a time when race relations after World War 2 were terrible, it is the women who fought for change, not by trying to be one of the boys, but by doing what is right. There's a lesson in this book for fundamentalist women masquerading as tomorrow's world leaders and change agents. The lesson? We can make this country a better place by first taking care of our children, our neighbors and our communities. |
A Bit Shy of Originality
| Customer Rating: | Both Jordan's prose and character development in this debut novel are quite satisfying. Though, the story itself, of social injustices on a farm in the Jim Crow South, seemed "familiar" and did not explore new territory....making it a bit dull. I will look forward to reading more of Jordan's works but hope they elicit a little more creativity and originality.
|
|
