Book #41: Mudbound

Title: Mudbound
Author: Hillary Jordan

Mudbound is exactly the kind of book I always like. A strong and somewhat flawed woman, struggling with a difficult situation. Laura McAllan is a city girl, living in Memphis just after the end of WWII, when her husband Henry comes home one day and announces that the family is moving to the new farm he purchased in rural Mississippi. Laura tries to make the best of her life on the farm, but when two soldiers return to the farm from the war (Henry's brother Jamie and Ronsel, the son of a black tenant family) everyone's lives become a lot more complicated.

Laura, Jamie, Ronsel, and Ronsel's parents are all interesting, complicated and sympathetic characters, who make the book come alive and are definitely worth the time invested in reading the novel. I feel like I didn't understand Henry as well as I would have liked. Jordan opens the novel with the story of Laura and Henry's courtship, stressing that both were sort of past their expiration dates in terms of marriageable age (and may therefore have jumped at the opportunity despite not being perfectly matched) but it seems that they communication issues. I wish that Henry were as fully-rounded and complicated a character as his wife. And Pappy (Henry's father) frankly baffles me. I couldn't figure out whether he was a backwoods redneck or a closed-minded townie. Either way, he was mean. And either way, you should read Mudbound.