NEXT BOOK and GATHERING – The Yellow House: A Memoir 24-Feb
NEXT BOOK!
More NOLA Book Club!
Our next book for NOLA Book Club will be The Yellow House, by Sarah M. Broom. A 2019 National Book Award winner, “The Yellow House” is a memoir of a family living in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.
Our Gathering (via Zoom) to discuss “The Yellow House” will be WEDNESDAY, February 24th. That’s the week after Mardi Gras.
Get the book
You can purchase “The Yellow House” through all the usual suspects. Since NOLA Book Club fully and passionately supports Local/Indie booksellers, may we suggest (if you’re local to New Orleans) these shops:
- Octavia Books – Go to their website, they do curbside pickup. They’ll also ship.
- Blue Cypress Books – They’ll also bring the book out to you.
- Tubby & Coo’s Mid-City Book Shop – ping them for info on ordering/pickup.
We had a lot of fun discussing Maurice’s novel last week. This story will be quite of a change of pace from “We Cast A Shadow.” It’s guaranteed to get you choked up a bit if you have memories of Da East. Since Ms. Broom received a great deal of recognition for “The Yellow House,” some of you may have already read the book. That’s great! You’ll have a month to refresh your memory and be ready to talk it up.
The Yellow House: A Memoir
Here’s the trailer for the book:
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction
A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant–the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
See you on Wednesday the 24th of February!
