Notes from Book Group January 2009

This month we discussed Mudbound by Hilary Jordan. Everyone in the group liked this book, which is unusual for everyone to like it. The book was set in the mid 1940’s during World War II. Two of the book’s main characters had fought in that war and came home to very different receptions.

We had a very lively discussion among ourselves – some of us have lived in the midwest all of our lives and others had lived in the south at one time or another and experienced firsthand some of the attitudes that pertain to racism. The McAllen’s uproot their family from their comfortable home in the city and move to a remote cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta that does not even have indoor plumbing or electricity. When it rains the road to town is covered with water and the family lives in a sea of mud. Henry and Laura McAllen and their 2 children live with Henry’s mean, hateful, racist father.

The two celebrated soldiers of World War II return home to the Delta. Jamie McAllan is everything his older brother Henry is not: charming, handsome, and sensitive to Laura’s plight, but also haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black tenant farmers who live on the McAllan farm, comes home from fighting the Nazis only to face far more personal battle against racism. The two form an unlikely friendship and they arouse passions in others that drive this powerful debut novel.