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    Mudbound
    Mudbound
    Mudbound
    Audiobook9 hours

    Mudbound

    Written by Hillary Jordan

    Narrated by Ezra Knight, Kate Forbes, Joseph Collins and

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Hillary Jordan's mesmerizing debut novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction. A powerful piece of Southern literature, Mudbound takes on prejudice in its myriad forms on a Mississippi Delta farm in 1946. City girl Laura McAllen attempts to raise her family despite questionable decisions made by her husband. Tensions continue to rise when her brother-in-law and the son of a family of sharecroppers both return from WWII as changed men bearing the scars of combat.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateOct 3, 2008
    ISBN9781436133104
    Mudbound
    Author

    Hillary Jordan

    Hillary Jordan spent fifteen years working as an advertising copywriter before starting to write fiction. Her first novel, Mudbound, was named one of the Top Ten Debut Novels of the Decade by PASTE magazine. It won the 2006 Bellwether Prize, founded by Barbara Kingsolver and awarded biennially to an unpublished debut novel that addresses issues of social justice. Hillary grew up in Dallas, Texas and Muskogee, Oklahoma. She lives in Brooklyn. hillaryjordan.com

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    Reviews for Mudbound

    4/5

    1,132 ratings127 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A story of 1940s Mississippi. A tale of two families; one black, the other white. Henry McAllen moves from the city with his wife, two young daughters and his cantankerous, racist father to land he has just bought. On that land are four sharecroppers but the story focuses on one family, that of Hap Jackson his wife and three young children. Henry's younger brother is off fighting in WWII as is Hap's oldest son who are both around the same age. When the war ends both of these young men eventually return war weary and world-wise to the South of the Forties, a viciously, racist time and place.Each chapter is narrated by one of the six main characters and the whole story unfolds slowly through the eyes of each one. The contrasting eyes of Hap, an enterprising black man trying to get his family their own land, and Henry, who considers himself forward thinking where 'coloreds' are concerned yet who knows the limits. The contrasting eyes of Florence, black sharecropper wife who is midwife to the local black folks and Laura, a city bred white woman who becomes beaten down by the farm land. And finally through the contrasting eyes of Jamie, returning white air force hero who is so mentally disturbed by the war he has become an alcoholic and cares not what anyone thinks of him outside the family, and Ronsell the returning hero from the first fighting black platoon, directly under Patton's orders, and a deeply loving and caring man but in his returning home of Mississippi he is just a n*gger.I really hate to gush in my reviews but all I want to say about this book is "Wow! Wow! Wow!". Beautiful, brilliant, sad, and disheartening yet ending on a bittersweet slight glimpse of hope. I felt for each and every one of the six main characters. It takes a lot of skill to write a book through the eyes of 6 different people but Jordan pulls it off with flowing grace. Beautiful and heartrending. Read this book!
    • 5/5
      Mudbound lives up to its descriptive name. It begins and ends at a muddy gravesite with intervening times of hardship and toil on a struggling cotton farm. It is post WWII in the Mississippi Delta. The land is harsh and the people are harsher. Hatred and bigotry are major themes in this work that earned the Bellwether Prize for Ms. Jordan's first fiction account of social justice. Unfortunately, there was no real justice in this riveting book about racial tensions in the south, but I must say the final retribution of Pappy was both satisfying and necessary. The last three pages were more of an Afterword and are a well-deserved tribute to those who create dignity out of degradation and triumph out of tragedy.
    • 5/5
      I found this book to be a haunting story with a plot that moves fast with great characters. Hard to put down!
    • 4/5
      Mudbound by Hillary Jordon
      324 pages

      ★★★★

      Taking place in the 1940s in the Jim Crow South – this story revolves around two families and is told from the point of view of 6 different people. It’s a difficult to give too much a description without giving away this one.

      This is a book I’ve had for years and have never read. I didn’t know what to expect – I’m terribly lazy at reading the synopsis for most books, I just wing it especially if recommended by a trusted group of friends. And what a wonderful and heart-wrenching story this was – from all aspects. I loved the writing and I enjoyed the different views, how one event could be seen so different depending on the person. The characters were well written, they weren’t flat and boy did she really make you hate those characters you were supposed to but there were so many ones to love as well. While it was a novel, it was a good lesson in history. I am glad I finally got around to reading this wonderful book. Worth the read if you have yet to read it.
    • 4/5
      A strong hint of impending violence comes early in this spare, confident story of racism and the emotional wounds of war, set in the delta cottonlands of Mississippi. The racial divide is as deep as the mud, the unwaveringly hateful Pappy it's torchbearer. Six narrators, all carrying strife and sorrow, give us a convincing tale of a wretched (recent) past. The promise of a better day comes very late in the book, but it does come. A fine, moving first novel.
    • 5/5
      5***** and a &#10084This is a work of literary fiction that deals with what it means to live in the Jim Crow south just after World War II, when being a war hero isn’t enough to get respect if your skin is black.The story is told in alternate voices – one character per chapter. We have Laura, a woman from an educated household, a college graduate and “spinster” when she marries Henry McAllan at age 31 in Memphis. Henry is the oldest son of “Pappy” McAllan, a mean, prejudiced cur of a man who sold his wife’s family land at the earliest opportunity and moved in with his married daughter and her banker husband after his wife died. Henry has always longed to be back on the land, farming. And when his brother-in-law dies, and he’s left trying to fix his sister’s life and take on the care of his father, he makes a sudden decision (without consulting Laura) to buy a piece of land near Marietta GA. He plans to rent a house in town for Laura and their girls, but he is taken advantage of and without a lease he has no choice but to move the family onto the farm … a ramshackle building with a leaky roof, no electricity, no phone and no plumbing. Laura accepts her lot as Henry’s wife, but puts her foot down when it comes to having Pappy in the same 2-bedroom house – No. So Pappy is moved to the lean-to (after Henry puts in a floor).As is typical of the South in 1947, they have sharecroppers on the land. Six families live there when Henry buys the place, but he lets three of them go, keeping the three he feels work the hardest. One of these families is the Jacksons – Hap, Florence and their children: Lilly May (who has a club foot), twins Ruel and Marlon (about age 10), and their oldest Ronsel who is away at war when the novel opens. Ronsel is a shining star in the black community – a handsome, strong, intelligent man who has more schooling than most of his contemporaries. He’s a decorated soldier of the 761st Black Panther Tank Battalion and has seen a different world in Europe, where a black man is accepted based on who he is, not shunned based on his skin.Florence is a strong woman – physically, mentally and emotionally. She’s a midwife and tends her family and her “ladies” with a no-nonsense competence. She also begins to work for the McAllen’s as a cook and housekeeper, helping Laura partly out of pity but mostly because her family can use the extra money. Hap is a man of his race and generation. He’s strong, works hard and smart, is a preacher, and counsels his children to “know their place” in the white man’s world.And finally we have Jamie, the youngest McAllen son, who has been a bomber pilot in Europe and returns a changed man … charming as ever most of the time, but drinking to excess to quell his demons. His inability to stand up to his father, and his shame over this is a central force in the book.When Ronsel returns and begins a vague friendship with Jamie over a bottle of whiskey events are set in motion which can only lead to the inevitable tragedy. The ray of hope in the final chapter is a lifeline the author offers. I’m conflicted about accepting it.
    • 4/5
      A story of struggle, family, and devotion.
    • 4/5
      At the time it was published, there was a lot of hype about this book, and for that reason I avoided it. I'm sorry I did. In this case, the hype was deserved.The novel takes on two themes still pertinent today:PTSD suffered by soldiers returning from war (in this case WW II), and race relations, which although this novel is set in 1946 don't seem to have progressed as much as we would have hoped.Laura and her husband Henry have begun to farm on the Mississippi delta in 1946. They have several sharecroppers, including a black family. Henry's father, a virulent racist and member of the KKK lives with them. Shortly afterwards, Henry's younger brother, Jamie, a war veteran, comes to stay with them. The oldest son of the black sharecroppers, Ronsel, also returns from the war, and he and Jamie strike up a friendship based on their mutual experiences. This doesn't sit well with Henry's father Pappy, or with some of the other townfolk, and we are headed for a tragedy.The novel is told in alternating chapters by the various characters, including (primarily) Laura, Henry, Jamie, Ronsel, and Ronsel's parents Florence and Hap. The characters are beautifully and realistically depicted, and the story is devastating. Highly recommended.4 stars
    • 3/5
      Adult fiction; historical fiction. Set in 1940s rural mississippi, this tells the individual stories of a farmer, his wife, his war-traumatized veteran brother, and the black sharecroppers that farm their land--husband, wife, and another ww2 vet son.
    • 4/5
      This is incredibly well written. It is so painful to read that I have stopped. I have reached the place where the tragedies are inevitable and I just cant' stand to watch it happen.
    • 4/5
      Laura came of age in Memphis during the first half of the 20th century. In her 30s and single, she had come to terms with the likelihood of never marrying. But then she met Henry McAllan, the eldest son in a farming family. When Laura and Henry married, she gave up all that was familiar to her and followed him to a plot of land in Mississippi. Their primitive living conditions were vastly different from her genteel surroundings in Memphis, and on top of that she had to endure Henry’s cantankerous and bigoted father. Their story is narrated in turns by Laura, Henry, Henry’s brother Jamie, and members of their black sharecropping family: Florence, Hap, and their son Ronsel. Every character is well developed, and it is interesting to read the story from multiple points of view.And Hillary Jordan doesn’t hold back in her depiction of realistic and disturbing scenes. Race matters form the central conflict in this novel, and escalate in ways that are sadly all too predictable. I wish I could say we’ve left all of this behind, but as I write this review, our country is once again reckoning with the senseless death of a black man. Will it ever end?
    • 4/5
      Two families in rural Mississippi shortly after WWII, a black share tenant family, and the white landowners they work for are the major characters as well as the narrative voices of this novel. Each family has a son who served in the war and who stays in Europe for a time after it ends, before coming back to a world where they no longer belong. Jamie MacAllan was a bit messed up before he joined the air corps; his father has always treated him as a lesser being than his much older brother Henry. His distinguished service as a bomber pilot has not improved his father's opinion of him nor his treatment, which is emotionally and sometimes physically abusive. Jamie is tormented by nightmares about the people he dropped bombs on, and by his father's taunts that a "real man" would have fought on the ground...facing the people he was paid to kill. Ronsel Jackson served as a tank commander in a segregated unit under General Patton (the real "Black Panthers", the 761st Tank Battalion---its history makes very interesting reading). He comes home to a loving family, but a social environment that has no more respect for a black man than it did before he left. Neither he nor Jamie have any business trying to return to this place, and they have much more in common with each other than they do with their "equals" at home. One of the things they have in common is a fondness for the oblivion bestowed by a bottle of whiskey, which only adds to the inflammatory situations they find themselves in. There are other voices in this novel as well---Henry and his wife, Laura; Ronsel's mother Florence and his father, Hap. All come alive on the page and engage our sympathies to a greater or lesser degree. The only main character we do not hear from directly is Pappy, Henry and Jamie's shiftless cantankerous sire--we are free to despise him without reservation. A page-turner that will churn your stomach and crush your heart.Review written January 2019
    • 5/5
      Jordan demonstrates that the good-old days after World War II were not good for blacks in the South, poor struggling farmers and for women. Her characters came alive off the page and stirred strong emotions of sympathy for Laura and loathing toward the small-minded men who fought against the inevitable changes in society with violence and cruelty. I especially enjoyed that the chapters were told from various points of view, which gives the reader deeper insight into the actions and motivations of the characters. A moving story, I recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Really well done; taut and brutal, with not an extra word wasted.
    • 4/5
      Aside form the annoying foreshadowing statement, the import of which is born just by the novels characters, setting, and plot, this reads well and is in fact quite cinematic in most of its aspects - the characters are clear and given some depth, the setting it relentless and the social situation grimly explored. And yes, the black man bears the brunt of the violence, only to be expected given the set-up. OK, yeah Pappy doesn't survive, but since that's in the first page and we're told at the start what a shit he is, it's all the lead up why they're burring him in that way.
    • 5/5
      The people here are each so individual and well-portrayed, but what the book is known for is its plot and setting. It is indeed an excellent portrayal of a particular place and time when women and blacks not only knew their place but faced punishment or death for any protest. For once, the Netflix movie made from the book does a superb job of transferring the tone and attitudes to the screen. Missed Henry having white hair but, if that’s the worst I can come up with, they did a pretty fine job. (Smiling) Both novel and film will stay in your memory. Not a happy-happy tale, but definitely unforgettable.
    • 5/5
      Heartbreakingly good.
    • 4/5
      This was a very fast and enjoyable book. Each chapter is told by a different character from the story. I love this type of writing. You get to read about one particular event in the eyes each person's perspective. It is very interesting to see a story unfold in this way.

      I liked it and would recommend to anyone interested in the South during and after WWII. We cover family struggles, race relations, brutality, loss and so much more...I enjoyed (is that the right word?) the deliberate comparisons of Nazi Germany to the Deep South. Shocking to say the least and well written, IMO.
    • 4/5
      Best for: Those interested in fiction told from multiple viewpoints.In a nutshell: Post-WWII Mississippi. A white family takes over a farm that includes Black tenant farmers.Worth quoting:“I simply got up and went on. I bathed my sour body, combed my hair, put on a clean dress and took up my roles of wife and mother again, though without really inhabiting them. After a time I realized that inhabiting them wasn’t required. As long as I did what was expected of me — cooked the meals, kissed the cuts and scrapes and made them better, accepted henry’s renewed nocturnal attentions — my family was content. I hated them for that, a little.”Why I chose it: I picked up this (signed!) copy at a used bookshop near my new apartment. I’ve been hearing a lot about it this awards season and thought I’d check out the book first.Review: I tend to really enjoy books like this, where something has happened at the beginning, and the rest of the book gets us there. Bonus points when it’s told from multiple perspectives. It’s like a Liane Moriarty book, only much more intense.Mudbound refers to the name of the farm that Henry purchases without his wife’s knowledge just after the end of WWII. It is a cotton and soybean farm, and has some tenant farmers, including a black family. The matriarch ends up working for Henry’s wife Laura, and their lives end up intertwined, at least for a time. The book addresses issues of race and racism in the U.S., including the impact of that racism on Black men returning from fighting overseas, where they were often treated much better than in the states. Suddenly having to use a different door again, or not being allowed to speak to white people informally.The only hesitation I have with this book is that it is written by a white woman, and while I am fully aware that the n-word was used freely during this time, I always feel a bit off when I see it written by a white person. I don’t get the same feeling as when, say, Quentin Tarantino decides to use it in every other line in a film (i.e, it actually fits in here), but it still gives me some pause. Regardless, I strongly recommend this if you’re looking for some fiction to add to your to-be-read pile.
    • 4/5
      Wow - well written but difficult subject matter to tackle but stirring emotionally. Can't imagine what it was like for so many during that time to make a living and just to survive. Many moments will stay with me for a long while. Was disgusted at how people treated each other then but realized not much has changed unfortunately. I look forward to seeing the movie.
    • 5/5
      The story briefly follows the lives of two returned soldiers from World War II. One a bomber pilot who flew hundreds of missions and the other headed up a tank crew with Patton. Ronsel is the eldest son of a black sharecropper family. Jamie McAllen returns home to the McAllan cotton farm recently purchased by his older brother. Both Ronsel and Jamie are drawn together and troubled by memories of their wartime experiences. Events lead them to battle bigotry and racism. The author weaves forbidden love and raw brutality in this book that mirrows viewpoints of its main characters. Not a fairy-tale ending but the author has captured a moment of southern "Jim Crow' history. Highly recommended read and the movie made from this book is also worth watching (Available on Netflicks).
    • 5/5
      4.5 starsThe opening chapter has brothers Henry and Jamie burying their seemingly unlikable father. From there, the book backs up in time to tell of Laura and Henry’s marriage in the late 1930s, into the 1940s, and their move from a city to rural Mississippi to run a farm, Henry’s dream. But, they have Henry’s father, Pappy, living with them and their two daughters and making their lives miserable. Jamie has been over in Europe fighting in the Second World War. Henry employs three black families on the farm, one of which is the Jacksons, and Laura employs Florence Jackson to help in the house. The Jacksons eldest son, Ronsel, has also been fighting in the war. Things get worse for the families once Jamie and Ronsel come home. It is the South, after all, and racism and the KKK are still alive and kicking. Wow, this was really good. It mostly wasn’t fast-paced, but I wanted to keep reading. It was told from multiple points of view, so that made things a little more interesting (and it was easy to follow whose viewpoint it was, as the chapter was not only introduced with their name, their name was the “running title” at the top of each page for that chapter). Ugh, some of those people are so hateful! Even the nicer people have unlikeable reactions, in some cases! This is likely to be one of my favourites for this year.
    • 4/5
      A story with alternating narrators, of two different men returning to a small southern town after WWII. One man is Jamie, a white man who returns to the rustic home of older brother Henry. Henry fought in WWI and so is familiar with some of the traumas Jamie is trying to forget. Completing their household is their father (racist, violent “Pappy) and Laura (Henry’s kind but discontented wife). Another man returning from the war is Ronsel, the son of a black sharecropper on Henry’s land. After the freedom of near-equality he discovered in Europe it’s difficult for Ronsel to return to being considered less than human by the racists in his home town. I really liked this story, even though the violence and racism were difficult to read about at times. The writing was lyrical but easy to understand. You end up feeling very sorry for most of the people in this story, who are caught up in situations they didn’t expect and never wanted. I really enjoyed the loving, understanding relationship between Jamie and Henry.
    • 4/5
      Heartbreaking story about life post WWII in Jim Crow's South. Makes me feel so angry and helpless at the potential lost both in the wars and in the South. Well told and brutal.
    • 3/5
      Hillary Jordan does a good job bringing the language and attitudes of both black and white rural Mississippians living in the years surrounding World War II to life. The story is told by six "voices". Laura's voice is perhaps the one we hear from most frequently. She is a "city" (Memphis) born woman who marries when in her early 30's and had given up on marriage and motherhood. Her husband is Henry, a basically good but also inconsiderate man and it is his dreams of farm life that bring his wife and daughters to live on a remote cotton farm with him and his hateful father. Another voice belongs to Jamie, Henry's much younger charming brother, a returning war hero with a serious drinking problem and some other unresolved issues. Hap is a middle aged black tenant farmer and an almost saintly part time preacher and his voice helps us understand the hopes, desires and choices of many black Southern Americans of that time. His wife Florence is a sharply observant voice who sees much as "granny midwife" to the poorer people in the area and in her other role as housekeeper for Laura and her family. Florence and Hap's son Ronsel is the last voice. Ronsel returns from service in World War II much changed after seeing the greater acceptance of blacks in Europe and other parts of the United States and finds difficulty in accepting the subservient plight of black folks in the Jim Crow Delta.

      The beginning and ending of the novel are the weakest parts. The beginning chapter in which we meet Jamie and Henry digging a grave should be compelling but somehow isn't and I had to force myself to continue reading and was fortunately soon rewarded as Laura begins to tell her story. The ending of the book also has problems and is not nearly as strong as the author seemed to have intended. In fact the overall quality of writing in the novel weakens after the tragic climax. There are also some very predictable plot elements that keep the story from seeming as original as it could be. Yet this is a very readable worthy book with some important messages about racism and humanity as well as some real insight in to life in the Delta sixty some years ago.
    • 5/5
      Mississippi in 1946, a delta county filled with people capable of rage, lusty bigotry,recklessness and betrayal. A remarkable novel that allows us to live along side diverse characters both black, like Hap and Florence and their son Ronsel and white like Laura and husband Henry, Henry's brother Jamie, and their father Pappy. The story is told in chapters narrated by different characters so we get to know laura who starts as a spinster then becomes a farmer's wife on Mudbound, then a mother and discovers what she is capable of. We get to know Henry, her husband who only ever wanted to be a farmer and is a good soul but struggles to see beyond a black person's place and a white's. Jamie is the playboy a returned fighter pilot who cannot get his life on track and with good intentions creates drama. Henry and Jamie's father Pappy is a bigotted, rude, uncouth piece of trash who gets his just reward at the end. The black characters are Florence, who helps Laura and her husband Hap a preacher and a tenant farmer on Henry's land. he and Henry are more alike then they realize. Florence and Hap's son Ronsel has also returned from war in one of the only black regiments to serve. He struggles with returning as a subservient black man. This relationship between the black and white Delta man, at the cusp of civil rights, is the basis of this very excellent novel. I enjoyed every minute of it.
    • 5/5
      In 1939, at age thirty-one Laura is considered almost unmarriageable. All of her siblings have married and left the family home in Memphis. She has resigned herself to the fate of spinster schoolteacher when Henry McAllen appears and wants to marry her. He seems like a kind man, even if he is ten years older than her and with a limp from his time in France during the Great War. Unlike her family, he prefers the country and wants someday to move back to Mississippi and have his own farm. Feeling that this may be her only chance for marriage Laura swallows her fears and agrees. World War II changes both of their plans and those of everyone around them, but when the war ends, Henry moves his family, now grown to include two daughters and his father, to a farm in rural Mississippi. The life and people they encounter there shape the narrative of Hillary Jordan’s powerful debut novel Mudbound. Through a series of unfortunate events Henry and Laura do not get the lovely house and acreage Henry described for their farm. Instead, he is swindled and they must live on their land in a shack with no plumbing or electricity. Henry has not deliberately lied to Laura but it hardly matters; her life has gone from one of gentility to one of drudgery. In short order she has not only two children to take care of, but also Henry’s father, a miserable, belligerent racist, who makes everyone’s life as miserable as the inside of his own twisted mind. Their income is derived in part from their own crops and from another family who lives on a parcel of their land. The Jacksons have the same kind of dreams as the McAllens but as blacks in the 1940s South they are even less likely to achieve them. Jordan gives all of the main characters in Mudbound a voice, and delineates them so clearly it never becomes confusing. As different as they are two of the most memorable are Ronsel and Laura. He is the hope of his parents, but is unable to reconcile himself to being relegated a second class citizen in the country he fought for with distinction. The intelligence and pride that served him so well in Europe only causes him problems in Mississippi. For Laura, life is a dreary, loveless existence acting as a maid to a bitter, racist old man who, despite having sold his son’s birthright, believes his word is law. That Jordan can slip into the skins of such a diverse and conflicted set of characters means that by the end she has laid her story down so skillfully that their actions, as repugnant as some may be, are the only option. Mudbound is filled with a strong, quiet sorrow that permeates the page the way the mud pervades every aspect of its characters’ lives. It is a portrait of a time in American history that is as shameful now as it was then.
    • 4/5
      Mudbound is both the name of the farm Laura and her family now live in in the Mississippi Delta, and not only is the farm like that whenever there is a storm, but so are the lives of the people in it in many ways. Laura had once settled down to a life of spinsterhood when she first met Henry, who saved up and took their family to a farm he bought without telling her first. They were later joined by his obstreperous, racist father, Pappy, after the suicide of his brother in law and eventually by Henry’s younger brother, Jamie, who was destroyed emotionally after his role as a bomber pilot in WW II.

      Florence comes to work for Hillary because they can use the extra money to help save to buy their own land. She and her husband, Hep, work some of Henry’s land and since they own their own donkey, only have to pay him half of their crop. Her son, Ronsel is a vet from the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion who had to leave behind his German lover and return to life in an area that still observed Jim Crow, and this doesn’t go easy for him. He and Jamie begin to form a friendship, but it is thwarted when no one in the town wants them to even share the same cab in a truck.

      Told from the points of view of Jamie, Henry, Laura, Hep, Florence and Ronsel, this is a powerful American tragedy that I think deserves a long-lasting place in the halls of American literature.
    • 3/5
      My take: 3 stars
      Typical story of racism in the south after WWII. Black sharecroppers on the land of white owners. Some whites hates blacks and other simply follow the rules because they are the social mores of the day. That is the typical part of the story. The part that sets this book apart is the comparison and contrast of the characters.

      The book is written from the perspectives of six characters, half white and half black: Two husbands, two wives, and two war veterans just returned home. The women are the richest and most complex.

      Laura is a white wife, who is very submissive to her husband; however, he knows her moods: "A woman will make her feelings known one way or another. Laura's way is with music: singing when she's content, humming when she isn't, whistling tunelessly when she's thinking a thing over and deciding whether or sing or hum about it."

      In contrast, Florence is the black wife of a man who tends the land that he doesn't own. She is a headstrong midwife and let's her husband know where she stands: "You'll move if I say so, Hap (her husband) said. "For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church." Florence's reply: "Only so long as he is alive. For if the husband be dead the wife is loosed from his law. Says so in Romans."

      Henry and Hap are the husbands, one owns the land and the other works it. Jamie and Rosnel are both war veterans, and are dealing with their war-damaged psyches in different ways.

      There is one character who overshadows all of these, however, and we never get to hear from him. It's Pappy, the cruel racist father of Henry and Jamie, who lives with Henry and family. While I detested Pappy, his ways and his words, Jordan draws a very real character from this time, and I wanted to hear from him. What made him so hateful? Was he always mean? Did something happen in his life to set his ways, and his path on one of hate-filled vitriol? Why didn't we hear from him? Why would Jordan choose to make one of the most pivotal characters silent? It was disappointing.

      As was the last chapter, told by Rosnel. It was full of "what if" scenarios. I go the feeling that Jordan assumed the reader would want to know how Rosnel, out of all of the other characters, turned out. With me, this was not the case. Laura started the book, the book was really about her at its core, and I think Laura should have been the one to close it. To have Rosnel close it seemed needless and cast a hint of preference on the closing. It gave him an unnecessary spotlight at the end that marred the story.
    • 5/5
      “Mudbound” takes place in the Mississippi Delta in 1946 and focuses on two families: the McAllans and the Jacksons. The book opens with the digging of a grave and then flashes back in alternating chapters between the six main characters who provide a view of the events. Laura is a teacher who is resigned to to becoming a spinster. When she marries solid and reliable Henry she never knew of his dream of buying his own farm. She and Henry move to the delta along with Henry's vile and racist father, Pappy. Laura dubs the farm “Mudbound”. There's no electricity, no running water and no indoor plumbing. The land is a mud filled bog most of the time but Laura tries to make the best of the situation.

      One of the sharecropper families working on Henry's land is Hap and his wife Florence, who keeps house for Laura. The two families have something in common. Jamie, Henry's brother has returned from piloting bomber aircraft in WWII, and Ronsel, Hap and Florence’s son, has returned after leading a tank command for the 761st Black Panther Battalion, the only colored tank unit in the US Army. The world has changed during the war and the black soldiers are no longer willing to be treated like second class citizens. The white population is fearful and unwilling to allow any change. Both Jamie and Ronsel are tortured by their memories of the war. They meet and become friends, something that is forbidden when racial tensions are running high in Mississippi. They meet in secret, drinking and talking about the things they did during the war that no one else would understand. When we read Ronsel's chapters, we see the contrast of the time, where he gained respect in the military and was then subjected to harsh realities of racism upon his return home where prejudice was a normal way of life.

      I could not put this book down. The multiple plots connected in the heartbreaking story kept me completely mesmerized with the story and the characters. I thought it was hauntingly beautiful and tragic. I highly recommend it even though it's a dark book that provides a strikingly realistic portrayal of the pull of prejudice and poverty of 1940s Mississippi.