OUR BOOK CLUB read this National Book Award winning memoir for January. It's more of a family memoir than an individual memoir, commencing well before Broom herself is born and focusing on the house where she grew up and where her mother and some of her siblings continued to live until displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
The Yellow House has some of the allure of a big multi-generational novel, like Buddenbrooks...I mean, you know, mutatis mutandis. A Black family doing their best to make ends meet in New Orleans in the last quarter of the twentieth century differs in important ways from a German family in bourgeois splendor in Lübeck in the last quarter of the nineteenth. Nonetheless, the attention to forebears, to local historical context, to the different choices those in the rising generation make, the looming impact of huge, unforeseeable events--at its richest, The Yellow House has that kind of texture.
The book loses momentum whenever Broom is not in New Orleans, I feel. A chapter on her experience working in Burundi, for instance, seemed to me to belong in a different book. The Yellow House, its neighborhood, and the family within it all pop into vivid life, though, in a portrait of New Orleans from a perspective outside its fabled Quarter.
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