Slow to get into, but by the end transformative in a way that was deeply satisfying. This book stayed with me. ( )

Each chapter is told from a different person's perspective. Laura marries Henry but gets more than she bargains for when Henry moves her from the city to a remote farm (no water or electricity!) where she also has to try to get along with Henry's Pappy who is a very ornery man and his charming brother Jamie. One of their tenants on the farm is Hap, his wife Florence and their children, including their grown son Ronsel who has been serving in the first Black infantry in WWII. A great plot that the author unfolds in an effortless way. A truly good story that I kept wanting to get back to. ( )

loved it... so vived ( )

Mudbound starts off in an ominous mood, with two brothers burying their father. The weather in the Mississippi Delta has been rainy for the previous three days, but they have finally gotten the break in the weather they were looking for, so the brothers decide it's best if they complete the necessary digging as quickly as possible... In a shifting, kaleidoscopic viewpoint, the story is told piece by piece, while suspense builds. Laura McAllan's voice holds the package together - she both begins at the true beginning and fills in some of the details left out of the other characters' chapters. We soon discover that the old man is both abusive and racist, and that even his own family despises him.

Being a resident of the real Mississippi Delta, I feel obligated to point out that the author has taken some liberty with her geography. In reality, there is a Marietta, Mississippi - near which the story says the farm, Mudbound, is located - but Marietta is not as close to Greenville as Ms Jordan would have you believe. I will forgive her that discrepancy for giving us this wonderful novel... a little slight of hand with the location of the towns mentioned doesn't harm the story...

Mudbound has the flavor of a historical novel blended with mystery and suspense all in the same tightly written package. The characters are fully fleshed and of both types, those you love and those you love to hate. Long before the story ends, you'll figure out what's inevitably going to happen... yet there's still a compulsion to continue reading. A surprise is buried in the twisted ending which will leave you feeling both shocked and devastated, yet that ending is wholly appropriate to this compelling tale.

This isn't a YA book by any stretch of the imagination and is also not recommended for those sensitive to violence. Yet with that caviat in mind, I do recommend this book to the majority of readers looking for something that doesn't fit into the "light and fluffy" category.

This review has also been published on Dragonviews ( )

Henry McAllen has a solid job and lives in an urban environment. But he loves the earth and longs to have it fall through his fingers as he farms the Mississippi soil. A wounded WWI vet, he makes the decision to buy a farm and move his wife and two girls to rural Mississippi in the years following WWII.

His wife Laura is happy living in the city and stunned when Henry makes the decision to move without consulting her. To make matters worse, Henry's mean and racist father will be accompanying them. Laura finds it impossible to learn to love the land and longs to return to the city. Upon seeing the home she is to live in, she remarks:

"To me, it looked no different from the other land we'd passed. There were brown fields and unpainted sharecroppers' shacks with dirt yards. Women who might have been any age from thirty to sixty hung laundry from sagging clotheslines while gaggles of dirty barefoot children watched listlessly from the porch. After a time we came to a shack that was larger than the others, though no less decrepit. It had a deserted air."

Not until the arrival of Henry's brother Jamie, a WWII bomber pilot who is trying to forget those years but is haunted by the demons of his past, does Laura see a reprieve from her discouraging situation.

Hap and Florence Jackson are tenant farmers on Henry's land. Their son, Ronsel, returns from the war to help his parents, and is reminded quickly of the cruelty of Delta justice.

Hillary Jordan's debut novel, winner of the Bellwether Prize for fiction, revolves around these characters, who tell the story from their own points of view. She expertly develops the themes of loss, forgiveness, and the fleeting idea of home and how its meaning changes according to time and circumstance. Jordan also deftly illustrates the idea of man vs. man and man vs. nature with distinct clarity. Laura decides to start her story at the beginning:

"My father-in-law was murdered because I was born plain rather than pretty. That's one possible beginning. There are others: Because Henry saved Jamie from drowning in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Because Pappy sold the land that should have been Henry's. Because Jamie flew too many bombing missions in the war. Because a Negro named Ronsel Jackson shone too brightly. Because a man neglected his wife, and a father betrayed his son, and a mother exacted vengeance. I suppose the beginning depends on who's telling the story."

It is impossible to believe that this is Hillary Jordan's first published novel. Her storytelling abilites are only surpassed by her lyrical writing and nothing can prepare you for the stunning conclusion. Highly recommended. ( )