Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CAREY MULLIGAN, GARRETT HEDLUND & MARY J. BLIGE

When Henry McAllan moves his city-bred wife, Laura, to a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta in 1946, she finds herself in a place both foreign and frightening. Henry's love of rural life is not shared by Laura, who struggles to raise their two young children in an isolated shotgun shack under the eye of her hateful, racist father-in-law. When it rains, the waters rise up and swallow the bridge to town, stranding the family in a sea of mud.

As the Second World War shudders to an end, two young men return from Europe to help work the farm. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not and is sensitive to Laura's plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the farm, comes home from war with the shine of a hero, only to face far more dangerous battles against the ingrained bigotry of his own countrymen. These two unlikely friends become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.

• ISBN10: 0099524686
• ISBN13: 9780099524687
• Publish Date: 2 October 2008 (first published 4 March 2008)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Windmill Books
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 336
• 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.