May 1, 2023

As she is marched south to her new owner in Louisiana, having been sold by the white enslaver who fathered her, Annis is solaced by memories of her mother, the stories of her African warrior grandmother, and her sense of connection to the spirits of the earth. Another big book from MacArthur Fellow and two-time National Book Award winner Ward. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 21, 2023
Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing) returns with the wrenching and beautifully told story of a young enslaved woman on a rice farm in the Carolinas. Annis picks up survival skills from her mother, Sasha: foraging herbs and mushrooms, fighting in self-defense, calling upon spirits of nature for guidance, and knowing when to run. But after Annis’s enslaver father attempts to rape her and Sasha intervenes, Sasha is sent away to be sold. Later, Annis is forcibly taken to the New Orleans slave market with Safi, another enslaved girl with whom she’s fallen in love. After Annis is made to work on a sugarcane plantation, she soothes her fear and anger with the memory of Sasha (“Didn’t Mama say I was my own weapon? That I was always enough to figure a way out?”). She also encounters Aza, a tempestuous wind spirit who has taken the name of Annis’s grandmother. When Annis learns the truth about Aza and Sasha, she must decide if she will trust Aza or heed the bewitching calls of the other spirits to give in and join them in another realm, and thereby alleviate her suffering. Throughout, Ward uses stark and striking language to describe Annis’s pain (“Every step feels like bone studding the ground: not flesh, not foot”; “My jaw aches. When I wake, my teeth are loose in my mouth”). Readers won’t be able to turn away. Agent: Rob McQuilkin, Massie & McQuilkin.

Starred review from July 15, 2023
This intensely wrought tone poem stalks an enslaved girl's tortuous passage through the human-made and natural perils of the antebellum Deep South. Ward follows her award-winning Bois Sauvage trilogy (Where the Line Bleeds, 2008; Salvage the Bones, 2011; Sing, Unburied, Sing, 2017) by moving away from her native Mississippi and back in time to the rice fields of pre-Civil War North Carolina, where Annis, a bright young Black woman who has learned from her mother, enslaved like her, that the white man who owns her is also her father and his daughters (on whose school lessons about Aristotle and the social habits of bees she eavesdrops) are her sisters. Annis' mother enhances the younger woman's education with lessons in self-defense and survival tactics she carried with her from Africa, where, as she informs her daughter, her mother was a warrior queen. Annis will need all this inherited cunning and resilience after her "sire" sells her mother. Away from her chores, Annis finds solace from her lover, Safi, the bees carrying out their own chores in the nearby forest, and words from a poem about an "ancient Italian" descending into hell as intoned by her sisters' tutor. After Safi flees the plantation, Annis and other slave women are herded like cattle and sent off on a long, grueling march further south. Along the way, Annis has her first encounter with a dynamic woman spirit bearing the name Mama Aza, an imperious and enigmatic guardian angel guiding and protecting Annis from the more malevolent spirits that endanger the women's lives en route to the slave markets of New Orleans, which Annis likens to the "grief-racked city" of Dante's poem. There's little that Ward's narrative contributes to the literature of American slavery in its basic historic details. But what gives this volume its stature and heft among other recent novels are the power, precision, and visionary flow of Ward's writing, the way she makes the unimaginable horror, soul-crushing drudgery, and haphazard cruelties of the distant past vivid to her readers. Every time you think this novel is taking you places you've been before, Ward startles you with an image, a metaphor, a rhetorical surge that makes both Annis and her travails worth your attention. And admiration. Ward may not tell you anything new about slavery, but her language is saturated with terror and enchantment.

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Starred review from August 1, 2023
Annis, the teenage daughter of a Black mother and the white man who enslaved them, has grown up in the Carolinas under her mother's fierce protection, hearing tales of her grandmother, Mama Aza, an African warrior transported to slavery in America. Mama Aza passed down her skills in combat and herbalism to her daughter, who teaches them to Annis during secret nighttime sessions. Sold away from her mother, Annis must endure a grueling forced march to the slave markets of New Orleans and abuse on a sugar plantation, with only her wits and her mother's ivory awl to help her survive. Slavery is hell, and who better to describe it than Dante? Listening to her white half-sisters' school lessons, Annis has grasped the power of ""the Italian man's"" journey to the underworld, opening herself to her own spirit guides. On the road, Annis encounters the watery spirit Aza as well as She Who Remembers and They Who Give and Take, who offer counsel and bear witness to her unspeakable suffering. Ward's vivid imagery and emotionally resonant prose convey the horrors of chattel slavery in stark, unforgettable detail. Annis may have been debased, dehumanized, and wrenched away from everyone she loves, but she is guarded by her mother's most precious lesson, ""You don't need this ivory or them spears. In this world, you your own weapon.""HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The power and artistry of Ward's work has been celebrated with numerous major awards, and her new novel will be a magnet for readers.

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Starred review from September 1, 2023

With her latest novel, two-time National Book Award winner Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing) gives readers one of the greatest opening sentences to grace a page in recent memory: "The first weapon I ever held was my mother's hand." So begins the story of Annis, a young Black woman enslaved in the antebellum South, navigating the phantasmagoria of her shifting circumstances. The particular hell of slavery in the United States is well-represented in fiction, and Ward doesn't attempt any kind of reinvention here, nor does she go the route of grand allegory. Instead, she employs her prodigious skills to craft a deeply moving and empathic story of one woman's contention with her life's constants--death, loss, and the "descent" of the title, but also hope and the possibility of rebirth. Annis's journey is brutalizing both spiritually and corporeally, and Ward's language in rendering this world is as astonishing as the novel's first sentence promises: "Before turning away from the man who gave me the middle mud of my skin. Spit and spite the ground of the man who sells me...for stealing some life back from him." Occasionally, it feels like the narrative is missing the idiosyncrasy of Ward's "Bois Sauvage" books, but that's ultimately a minor quibble for a novel so bursting with miraculous turns of phrase and indelible images, no observation or incident too insignificant to demand anything less than Ward's full creative attention. VERDICT This testament to Ward's mastery of language should leave readers scrambling for a highlighter.--Luke Gorham

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