Synopsis:
Joshua and Christophe are twins, raised by a blind grandmother and a large extended family in a rural town on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast. They’ve just finished high school and need to find jobs, but in a failing post-Katrina economy, it’s not easy. Joshua gets work on the docks, but Christophe’s not so lucky. Desperate to alleviate the family’s poverty, he starts to sell drugs. He can hide it from his grandmother but not his twin, and the two grow increasingly estranged. Christophe’s downward spiral is accelerated first by crack, then by the reappearance of the twins’ parents: Cille, who abandoned them, and Sandman, a creepy, predatory addict. Sandman taunts Christophe, eventually provoking a shocking confrontation that will ultimately damn or save both twins. Ward inhabits these characters, and this world — black Creole, poor, and drug-riddled, yet shored by family and community— to a rare degree, without a trace of irony or distance.
Adult/High School–African-American twins Joshua and Christophe graduate from high school and try to find jobs. While Joshua has success becoming a dockworker, Christophe is less fortunate and desperation eventually finds him turning to drug dealing. The teens are loyal to their grandmother, who raised them after their mother moved to Atlanta to start a new life and their addict father disappeared. While this plot (and the books cover) may be reminiscent of an urban fiction title, the setting is unique–rural Mississippi–and the writing is distinctive. Wards beautiful language allows the location and characters to come alive, while her dialogue, written in a Southern vernacular, adds further texture. The plot is as leisurely as a hot Mississippi summer day, and although not much happens until the somewhat violent and surprising ending, this fully realized character study will appeal to teens who can see themselves here or who are interested in discovering realities far from their own lives.–Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
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Starred Review. Impoverished twins living along the Mississippi Gulf Coast struggle to survive after high school in Ward's starkly beautiful debut. Abandoned by their mother and raised by their loving but ailing grandmother, Joshua and Christophe DeLisle know job prospects are slim in rural Bois Sauvage, so they spend their days playing basketball and flirting with the local girls. Eventually, even with no work history, Joshua is hired to work on the docks, but Christophe falls in with the brothers' drug-dealing cousin. Too ashamed to admit that he spends his days in the park selling marijuana, Christophe secretly contributes to the family's expenses with regular deposits to his grandmother's purse. But when Christophe decides to start selling more dangerous drugs, tensions between the twins grow, and the arrival of their long-absent drug addict father sparks a violent confrontation. A fresh new voice in American literature, Ward unflinchingly describes a world full of despair but not devoid of hope. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
In her debut, Ward successfully escapes first-novel awkwardness, obviously knowledgeable of and comfortable with the milieu in which she sets her narrative: a hardscrabble town on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Local language, personal relationships, teenage angst, the male psyche, and the grind of poverty all ring authentic as the author positions two male twins, at the point of their high-school graduation, taking divergent paths as they seek to make their way in the world. Christophe and Joshua DeLisle have the mutual devotion only close siblings can know, but the challenge to make money to not only support themselves but also their grandmother, who raised them, is met in two different fashions, one legitimate, the other illegal; consequently, their devotion is threatened. Their lives are so squeezed economically that they must climb out of debt to be successful adults while also dealing with the difficult psychological barrier to personal success and fulfillment of having been abandoned by both parents, selfish individuals whose needs have always come before those of their children. A resonant novel for any reader; for background on the writing of it, see the adjacent “Story behind the Story.” --Brad Hooper
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