Salvage The Bones

[sandgrubber]

Every wondered what goes on inside the minds of dog fighters? I just finished an interesting novel, Jesmyn Ward. 2011, Salvage the Bones. (The Kindle version isn't that expensive if your library doesn't have it).

It's set in poor, black, rural Mississippi with a Category 5 storm coming onshore (Katerina, the storm that destroyed half of New Orleans). The author uses the voice of a teenage girl, motherless, with three brothers and an alcoholic father. China, a fighting pit bull bitch, belonging to one of the brothers, is one of the main characters in the book. The telling is blunt, not romanticized, and sometimes a little gory (eg, fight descriptions). You get the feeling that it is based on elements of the author's own childhood. It left me with a greater sense of the emotional bonds between fighters and their dogs, but also of the depth of ignorance, and the effects of extreme poverty on owning and breeding dogs. Not a pleasant read, but a good basis for intuiting what is going on in the lives and minds of a class of people that pedigree breeders almost universally despise.

Warning, no happy ending, lots of adult content.

Edited July 20, 2013 by sandgrubber

[raineth]

Every wondered what goes on inside the minds of dog fighters? I just finished an interesting novel, Jesmyn Ward. 2011, Salvage the Bones. (The Kindle version isn't that expensive if your library doesn't have it).

It's set in poor, black, rural Mississippi with a Category 5 storm coming onshore (Katerina, the storm that destroyed half of New Orleans). The author uses the voice of a teenage girl, motherless, with three brothers and an alcoholic father. China, a fighting pit bull bitch, belonging to one of the brothers, is one of the main characters in the book. The telling is blunt, not romanticized, and sometimes a little gory (eg, fight descriptions). You get the feeling that it is based on elements of the author's own childhood. It left me with a greater sense of the emotional bonds between fighters and their dogs, but also of the depth of ignorance, and the effects of extreme poverty on owning and breeding dogs. Not a pleasant read, but a good basis for intuiting what is going on in the lives and minds of a class of people that pedigree breeders almost universally despise.

Warning, no happy ending, lots of adult content.

I haven't read the book Sandgrubber but I did hear an interview with the author and it was fascinating.