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Title details for Mudbound by Hillary Jordan - Available

Mudbound

by Hillary Jordan
Ezra Knight
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
The International Bestseller
Now a major motion picture from Netflix, directed by Dee Rees, nominated in four categories for the Academy Awards.
In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm—a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not—charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.
As Barbara Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."
"A compelling family tragedy, a confluence of romantic attraction and racial hatred that eventually falls like an avalanche ... An engaging story."—The Washington Post

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    December 1, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781490611266
      • File size: 268306 KB
      • Duration: 09:18:58

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Six actors narrate Jordan's Bellwether Prize-winning novel, delivering a top-notch performance. Kate Forbes shines brightest as Laura McAllan, who is uprooted from her urban life in Memphis when her husband purchases a farm in Mississippi. The actors in the production are particularly skilled at using their voices to reflect the nuances of power, race, gender, and the struggle to survive. The only low note is Brenda Pressley's turn as Florence, a worker on the McAllan's farm. Jordan describes Florence as a woman of preternatural strength, yet her voice doesn't reflect that. Otherwise, every actor feels starkly real in this production, creating a vivid listening experience that depicts the ravages of oppression. J.T. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 5, 2007
      Jordan's beautiful debut (winner of the 2006 Bellwether Prize for literature of social responsibility) carries echoes of As I Lay Dying
      , complete with shifts in narrative voice, a body needing burial, flood and more. In 1946, Laura McAllan, a college-educated Memphis schoolteacher, becomes a reluctant farmer's wife when her husband, Henry, buys a farm on the Mississippi Delta, a farm she aptly nicknames Mudbound. Laura has difficulty adjusting to life without electricity, indoor plumbing, readily accessible medical care for her two children and, worst of all, life with her live-in misogynous, racist, father-in-law. Her days become easier after Florence, the wife of Hap Jackson, one of their black tenants, becomes more important to Laura as companion than as hired help. Catastrophe is inevitable when two young WWII veterans, Henry's brother, Jamie, and the Jacksons' son, Ronsel, arrive, both battling nightmares from horrors they've seen, and both unable to bow to Mississippi rules after eye-opening years in Europe. Jordan convincingly inhabits each of her narrators, though some descriptive passages can be overly florid, and the denouement is a bit maudlin. But these are minor blemishes on a superbly rendered depiction of the fury and terror wrought by racism.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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