Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

'This is storytelling at the height of its powers: the ache of wrongs not yet made right, the fierce attendance of history made as real as rain, as true as this minute. Hillary Jordan writes with the force of a Delta storm' - Barbara Kingsolver.

• ISBN10: 156512569X
• ISBN13: 9781565125698
• Publish Date: 4 March 2008
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 17 June 2021
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 328
• Language: English

Reviews

[readingwithwrin]

“What we can't speak, we say in silence.”

Mudbound is mostly told from the perspective of Laura, but we also see perspectives from Herny, Jamie, Florence, Hap, Ronsel, and Pappy.

With multiple different perspectives happening we really get to see what life was like in Mississippi after WWII. We see soldiers coming home, and a family that's used to city life adjusting to farm life. A father-in-law who is a despicable human being in my opinion. We also get to see share tenants and the struggles that they faced and how they always lived in fear of losing what they had made if the owner didn't like what they were doing or just wanted to make more money off of them.


Laura is one of those people I wanted to like and I did at first, but as time went on I started disliking her for little things she was doing when she would do something else and the process would just keep happening until the end of the book and then I just felt kind of meh about her.

My favorite characters in this book were Hap and Florence they had made a good life together and each had their own jobs and worked together as a team for there family. They knew what they wanted out of life and even though they still had lots of worries and uncertainty because of where they lived and the color of there skin they didn't let that stop them. Honestly, I want a whole book about this family and what they did next and how they dealt with the anger, etc that they had after what happened to there son.


As for the other characters, I was just meh about them too, they were realistic and true to the thinking of the time sadly. Which is what made me struggle with this book because I hate that there is still so much racism in this country and that a lot of people still think like Pap and Henry did about things. Jamie wanted to be good, but he had his own demons to fight and because of those demons he had to make awful choices that will affect someone else life forever.


Mudbound is one of those books that I kind of hated at times because of how realistic it felt. Because of that though I did give it a high-ish rating because it made me feel so many different emotions and it felt like I was actually there throughout the book and that this was possibly real life.

[Whitney @ First Impressions Reviews]

I read Mudbound several years ago for book club. We had gone through a rut of "happy books" which are not to my taste -- I prefer a little hardship in my reading material. A guy had recently joined which had me thinking "good, our selections won't/can't be gender specific and will be of more substance." It turns out that he likes happy books. (queue disappointment) I sat next to him at the meeting and saw he had taken notes. Being the nosy person I am I surreptitiously snuck a glance where I saw:

Stupid, Boring, NOTHING HAPPENS!

I was shocked, was he kidding me?

Obviously that last sentence implies that I believe things did happen in Mudbound. Brutal things that I am bursting at the seams to type, but no one likes a tattle tale. Grotesque, heinous, sickening things happen to a perfectly nice family who just happens to be black. As I sit at my keyboard writing this review I was suddenly reminded of Of Mice and Men. The scene that came to mind was of Lenny stroking Curly's Wife's hair, Ronsel Jackson, our protagonist does not stroke as hard as Lenny but the consequences are decidedly similar. There are few books I can say this of but the ending of Mudbound literally made me sick to my stomach. the rich detail through out the book moved me that much.

A short brief review I know, but I fear that if I didn't use restraint that all of the plot would unfold into incoherent drivel. I will simply conclude by saying that something happens.