Mudbound by Hillary Jordan #bookreview

Title: Mudbound
Author:  Hillary Jordan
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published Date: March 4th, 2008
Genre: Historical Fiction, Adult, book to movie
Page Count:328
Format: Hardcover

My Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★

Goodreads Summary: 
In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm - a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not - charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.

The men and women of each family relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become players in a tragedy on the grandest scale. As Kingsolver says of Hillary Jordan, "Her characters walked straight out of 1940s Mississippi and into the part of my brain where sympathy and anger and love reside, leaving my heart racing. They are with me still."

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 My Review:

“What we can't speak, we say in silence.”

Mudbound is mostly told from the perspective of Laura, but we also see perspectives from Herny, Jamie, Florence, Hap, Ronsel, and Pappy. 
With multiple different perspectives happening we really get to see what life was like in Mississippi after WWII. We see soldiers coming home, and a family that's used to city life adjusting to farm life. A father-in-law who is a despicable human being in my opinion. We also get to see share tenants and the struggles that they faced and how they always lived in fear of losing what they had made if the owner didn't like what they were doing or just wanted to make more money off of them. 

Laura is one of those people I wanted to like and I did at first, but as time went on I started disliking her for little things she was doing when she would do something else and the process would just keep happening until the end of the book and then I just felt kind of meh about her. 
My favorite characters in this book were Hap and Florence they had made a good life together and each had their own jobs and worked together as a team for there family. They knew what they wanted out of life and even though they still had lots of worries and uncertainty because of where they lived and the color of there skin they didn't let that stop them. Honestly, I want a whole book about this family and what they did next and how they dealt with the anger, etc that they had after what happened to there son. 

As for the other characters, I was just meh about them too, they were realistic and true to the thinking of the time sadly. Which is what made me struggle with this book because I hate that there is still so much racism in this country and that a lot of people still think like Pap and Henry did about things. Jamie wanted to be good, but he had his own demons to fight and because of those demons he had to make awful choices that will affect someone else life forever. 

Mudbound is one of those books that I kind of hated at times because of how realistic it felt. Because of that though I did give it a high-ish rating because it made me feel so many different emotions and it felt like I was actually there throughout the book and that this was possibly real life. 


This is also a book to movie and its release day is today on Netflix. I am interested to see what it's like and I'll try and tweet out about it once I've watched it.