The “wolf” that tracked all of these young men-and the author, too, when she experienced the isolation of being black at predominantly white schools-was the sense of how little their lives mattered. Joshua died senselessly after being struck by a drunk driver on a dark coastal road one night. The first to die (though his story is told last in the book) was her brother, Joshua, a handsome man who didn’t do as well in school as Ward and was stuck back home, doing odd jobs while his sister attended Stanford and later moved to N.Y.C. The five young black men featured here are the author’s dear friends and her younger brother, whose deaths between 20 were “seemingly unrelated,” but all linked to drug and alcohol abuse, depression, and a general “lack of trust” in the ability of society-and, ultimately, family and friends-to nurture them. In this riveting memoir of the ghosts that haunt her hometown in Mississippi, two-time novelist and National Book Award–winner Ward (Salvage the Bones) writes intimately about the pall of blighted opportunity, lack of education, and circular poverty that hangs over the young, vulnerable African-American inhabitants of DeLisle, Miss., who are reminiscent of the characters in Ward’s fictionalized Bois Sauvage.
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