First sentence:
From high up, fifteen thousand feet above, where the aerial photographs are taken, 4121 Wilson Avenue, the address I know best, is a minuscule point, a scab of green.
Description:
"Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House is a stunning debut memoir about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a neglected New Orleans neighbor hood.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom's mother, Ivory Mae, a fiercely determined and recently widowed nineteen-year-old, invested her life savings in a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. It was the height of the Space Race and the area was home to a major NASA plant. The optimism of post-war America seemed endless. In the Yellow House, Ivory Mae and her second husband, Simon Broom, who would be Sarah's father, built domestic tranquility one wobbly renovation at a time, their dreams perpetually under construction. The family would eventually number twelve children. When Simon died, six months after Sarah's birth, the Yellow House became Ivory Mae's thirteenth and most unruly child.
A brilliant interweaving of reporting, archival research, and gorgeously rendered family lore, The Yellow House tells the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy and that of a daughter who left home only to be continually pulled back, even after the house was wiped off the map by Hurricane Katrina." -- from the inside flap
My thoughts:
This is a very moving book about a family doing their best in New Orleans East - a place of promise that was sadly neglected and destroyed by bureaucracy and Hurricane Katrina. Sarah's journey both geographically and emotionally was moving and though provoking. It gave me a new appreciation of that one can't simply look at a place and truly understand the breadth and depth of people's lives there.
Date read: 8/9/2021
Genre: Memoir
Rating: 3*/5
ISBN-13: 9780802125088
Publisher: Grove Press
Year: 2019
# of pages: 372
Binding: Hardcover
LibraryThing page
