Salvage This World

I received this book for free from the publisher. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Salvage This World by Michael Farris Smith
Published by Little Brown and Company on April 25, 2023
Genres: Fiction / Literary
Pages: 272
Format: ARC
Source: Publisher
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In Michael Farris Smith's latest "riveting" epic, a young woman returns home with her child to her ghost-haunted father, while a religious extremist hunts the stormridden territory to find the girl who may be the region's savior. (Laird Hunt, National Book Award-nominated author of Zorrie and Neverhome)

There was no rising from the dead and there was no hand to calm the storms and there was no peace in no valley.
 
In the hurricane-ravaged bottomlands of South Mississippi, where stores are closing and jobs are few, a fierce zealot has gained a foothold, capitalizing on the vulnerability of a dwindling population and a burning need for hope. As she preaches and promises salvation from the light of the pulpit, in the shadows she sows the seeds of violence.
 
Elsewhere, Jessie and her toddler, Jace, are on the run across the Mississippi/Louisiana line, in a resentful return to her childhood home and her desolate father. Holt, Jace's father, is missing and hunted by a brutish crowd, and an old man witnesses the wrong thing in the depths of night. In only a matter of days, all of their lives will collide, and be altered, in the maelstrom of the changing world.
 
At once elegiac and profound, Salvage This World journeys into the heart of a region growing darker and less forgiving, and asks how we keep going—what do we hold onto—in a land where God has fled.
  Garden & Gun Top Reads of 2023 • Bibliolifestyle Best Literary Fiction of 2023 • Southern Living Southern Writers to Read Right Now

This is the first time that I have read any of Michael Farris Smith’s writing and I was quite impressed by how his writing pulled me in. I read this book over the course of a single day. When I did put it down, I quickly found myself coming back to it. This isn’t a feel-good story. It is a story of desperation filled with flawed characters that came to life through the writing. I am so glad that I decided to give this book a try.

Jessie finds herself on the run with her toddler son, Jace. She decides to go home to her father, Wade, who she hasn’t seen since she left when she ran off with Jace’s father as a teen. Jessie knows that people are after Holt and running was the only option but she is worried about what might have happened to him. There aren’t a lot of options in the hurricane-ravaged lands of southern Mississippi where the land is too wet to grow crops anymore. They will find themselves in more danger before things are over.

The descriptions in this book were incredibly vivid. I felt Jessie’s worry when she was on the run with her son and I loved seeing Wade encounter the grandchild that he didn’t know existed. All of the characters in this story were flawed but they were doing the best that they could, with a few setbacks. They obviously cared about each other even though they didn’t always know how to show it.

I would recommend this book to others. I thought that this book was not only incredibly well-written but also entertaining and thought-provoking. I would not hesitate to read more of this author’s work in the future.

I received a review copy of this book from Little, Brown and Company.

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