Men We Reaped (Ward) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[Ward] chronicles our American story in language that is raw, beautiful and dangerous… [Her] singular voice and her full embrace of her anger and sorrow set this work apart from those that have trodden similar ground… With loving and vivid recollection, she returns flesh to the bones of statistics and slows her ghosts to live again… [It’s a] complicated and courageous testimony.
Tayari Jones - New York Times Book Review


[H]eart-wrenching.… A brilliant book about beauty and death… at once a coming-of-age story and a kind of mourning song… filled [with] intimate and familial moments, each described with the passion and precision of the polished novelist Ward has become… Ward is one of those rare writers who’s traveled across America’s deepening class rift with her sense of truth intact. What she gives back to her community is the hurtful honesty of the best literary art.
Hector Tobar - Los Angeles Times


A memoir about loss in rural Mississippi that burns with brilliance.
Harper’s Bazaar


A memoir that, in plainsong prose punctuated with sudden poetic flashes, schools us in the unforgiving experiences from which [Ward] has drawn her triumphal fiction… It paints in unshowy colors her impoverished coming-of-age in the narrow strip of lowlands where Mississippi touches the Gulf of Mexico.… [Ward is an] eloquent envoy from a forgotten part of America… [Men We Reaped is an] unvarnished and penetrating view into the infernal machinery of race hatred, pervasive mistrust, self-loathing, drugs, guns, and life’s bloody accidents.
Ben Dickinson - Elle


Devastating… Ward is a vivid, urgent writer, and here she is bearing witness to poverty and racism, the inequality that plagues her community and so many others like it.… Her story shines a light on this darkness, reminding us we will never be able to lift it if we do not at least look.
Oprah.com


A lovely book about stuff so painful that Ward must have written it in a kind of fever… The final chapters are so moving you have to avert your eyes, both for the trauma and the tenderness.
Entertainment Weekly


[A] riveting memoir.… Ward has a soft touch, making these stories heartbreakingly real through vivid portrayal and dialogue.
Publishers Weekly


As [Ward] reflects on her losses, telling the stories of her community, she gives us an intimate understanding of deep-rooted social issues.
Library Journal


Ward…lovingly profiles each of those she lost, including a brother, a cousin, and close friends, and their tragic ends as she weaves her family history…. This is beautifully written homage, with a pathos and understanding that come from being a part of the culture described.
Booklist


An assured yet scarifying memoir by young, supremely gifted novelist Ward.… [I]t's a wonder that anyone should have escaped the swamp to make their way [the]world beyond it.… [B]eautifully written, if sometimes too sad to bear.
Kirkus Reviews