If you’ve followed me any length of time you likely know of my love for New Orleans. Each visit, I make a point of picking up a book or three at Faulkner House Books. This month’s book club selection (and last month’s too!) is from our most recent trip. The Yellow House is a highly acclaimed memoir set in my favorite city. I’m very much looking forward to this one!
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The Yellow House
by Sarah M. Broom
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant―the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
WHAT ARE YOU READING LATELY?
Other LWD Book Club Selections:
What’s better than curling up with a good book and a delicious cup of tea? And when the tea is named “Reading Nook“? Perfection.
Plum Deluxe “Reading Nook” tea blend
ISounds like a lovely story.
I’m currently alternating between yet another re-read of the Harry Potter books, reading a crafting series I started earlier in the year with one of my book clubs, and reading random other books that are either book club selections or things I’ve agreed to read and review for people. Though I’m doing so slower than normal for me, because I’m really not reading as much as I’d like to be at the moment.
It’s always fun to re-read a favorite series. Enjoy!