What We Are Reading Today: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells 100 years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities.
It is a “transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power,” said a review in goodreads.com.
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,” it added.
Critic Angela Flournoy commented in The New York Times: “Part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life, The Yellow House is a full indictment of the greed, discrimination, indifference and poor city planning that led her family’s home to be wiped off the map. It is an instantly essential text, examining the past, present and possible future of the city of New Orleans, and of America writ large.”
