Mudbound by Hillary Jordan

From Barnes & Noble

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Laura Chappell is a self-described spinster, a respected teacher and beloved daughter, sister, niece, and aunt. Laura's world, small and predictable, is both a taunt and a comfort in which she's determined to find contentment. Considered unmarriageable at 31, she's relieved to be set aside by friends and family as a woman with no prospects. But when her brother brings Henry, his new boss, home for dinner, Laura's small measure of contentment is revealed to be as hollow as it is contrived, and her years of deepening emptiness are no longer bearable.

Seven years later, Laura's struggling to raise her two small children on Henry's Mississippi Delta farm, a place she finds frightening and foreign with its heavy rains and irksome mud. It's not the beginning -- of a marriage, a family, or a life -- that she'd dreamed of. In the middle of this uncertainty, two of the town's favorite sons return from war: Henry's handsome, charming, and damaged brother, Jamie, and Ronsel Jackson, the son of black sharecroppers and a war hero whose military record has no currency in the Jim Crow South. The unlikely friendship that develops between these two veterans, the comfort that Laura tentatively seeks from Jamie, and the 1940s Mississippi where a blind eye is turned on so many wrongs all fan the flames of this powerful firestorm of a first novel to its inevitable conclusion. (Summer 2008 Selection)

From the Publisher

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 Barbara 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."

About the Author
HILLARY JORDAN grew up in Texas and Oklahoma and received her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Mudbound, her first novel, was awarded the 2006 Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingsolver to recognize literature of social responsibility.

The Washington Post - Ron Charles

Once Jordan gets these characters in place, she builds a compelling family tragedy, a confluence of romantic attraction and racial hatred that eventually falls like an avalanche. Indeed, the last third of the book is downright breathless.

Donna Bettencourt - Library Journal

Jordan's poignant and moving debut novel, winner of the 2006 Bellwether Prize, takes on social injustice in the postwar Mississippi Delta. Here, two families, the landowning McAllans and their black sharecroppers, the Jacksons, struggle with the mores of the Jim Crow South. Six distinctive voices narrate the complex family stories that include the faltering marriage of Laura and Henry McAllan, the mean-spirited family patriarch and his white-robed followers, and returning war heroes Jamie McAllan and Ronsel Jackson. In every respect, the powerful pull of the land dominates their lives. Henry leaves a secure job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to buy their farm, never noticing that the refined and genteel Laura dreams of escaping the pervasive mud and dreary conditions of farm life. Ronsel, encouraged by his war-hero status as a tank commander, wants to break away from the past and head North to a better future, while his parents, knowing no other life but farming, struggle to buy their own land. Jordan faultlessly portrays the values of the 1940s as she builds to a stunning conclusion. Highly recommended for all public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Family bonds are twisted and broken in Jordan's meditation on the fallen South. Debut novelist Jordan won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for this disquieting reflection on rural America, told from multiple perspectives. After steadfastly guarding her virginity for three decades, cosmopolitan Memphis schoolmarm Laura Chappell agrees to marry a rigid suitor named Henry McAllan, and in 1940 they have their first child. At the end of World War II, Henry drags his bride, their now expanded brood and his sadistic Pappy off to a vile, primitive farm in the backwaters of Mississippi that she names "Mudbound." Promised an antebellum plantation, Laura finds that Henry has been fleeced and her family is soon living in a bleak, weather-beaten farmhouse lacking running water and electricity. Resigned to an uncomfortable truce, the McAllans stubbornly and meagerly carve out a living on the unforgiving Delta. Their unsteady marriage becomes more complicated with the arrival of Henry's enigmatic brother Jamie, plagued by his father's wrath, a drinking problem and the guilt of razing Europe as a bomber pilot. Adding his voice to the narrative is Ronsel Jackson, the son of one of the farm's tenants, whose heroism as a tank soldier stands for naught against the racism of the hard-drinking, deeply bigoted community. Punctuated by an illicit affair, a gruesome hate crime and finally a quiet, just murder in the night, the book imparts misery upon the wicked-but the innocent suffer as well. "Sometimes it's necessary to do wrong," claims Jamie McAllan in the book's equivocal denouement. "Sometimes it's the only way to make things right."The perils of country living are brought to light in a confidently executednovel.

Product Details

• ISBN: 156512569X
  
• ISBN-13: 9781565125698
• Format: Hardcover, 328pp
• Publisher: Workman Publishing Company, Inc.
• Pub. Date: March 2008
• Sales Rank: 5,470