Over the days building up to Katrina, through the hurricane and the day after, 15-year-old Esch narrates her life in a poor rural area of Mississippi. Esch's mother is dead, her father is drunk more often than not; her brother Randall is hoping for a basketball scholarship, her brother Skeetah is obsessed with his pit bull, China, and her puppies, and their youngest brother Junior tags along with whichever sibling will let him. As the hurricane approaches, Esch realizes she's pregnant, but the father - her brother's best friend - won't acknowledge it. There is a striking difference between Esch's interior monologue (highly literate, observant, insightful, lovely) and the characters' dialogue ("She don't know how..." "You got to..." "We was just about to..." "I ain't cooking you no noodles"), but it's not a dialogue-rich book.

Recommended for: fans of Southern literary fiction, fans of Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman, Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison, The Homecoming of Samuel Lake by Jenny Wingfield, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Quotes:

"We pass what used to be the elementary school...and suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it. (251)

He will look into the future and see her...and when he sees her, his face will break and run water, and it will wear away, like water does, the heart of stone left by her leaving. (258)