1. The Yellow House Sarah M Broom Reviews
2. Sarah M Twitter
3. The Yellow House Sarah M Broom
4. The Yellow House Sarah M Broom Images Book

The Yellow House is decidedly local. At one point, Broom includes the astonishing statistic that before Katrina, New Orleans had the highest rate of native-born citizens of any U.S. City; after the storm, those numbers dropped. The Yellow House also paints a picture of an unapologetically black city. 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.

The Yellow House is a memoir by Sarah M. Broom. It is Broom's first book and it was published on August 13, 2019 by Grove Press.^[2]The Yellow House chronicles Broom's family (mapping back approximately 100 years), her life growing up in New Orleans East, and the eventual demise of her beloved childhood home after Hurricane Katrina. Broom also focuses on the aftermath of Katrina and how the disaster altered her family and her neighborhood. At its core, the book examines race, class, politics, family, trauma, and inequality in New Orleans and America. The Yellow House won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Publication[edit]

The Yellow House was published by Grove Press on August 13, 2019,^[2] following the publication of an early excerpt in the New Yorker in 2015.^[3] The book debuted at number 11 on the Hardcover Nonfiction best sellers list for the September 1, 2019, edition of The New York Times.^[4]

Reception[edit]

In a pre-publication review, Dwight Garner of the New York Times wrote, 'This is a major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade.'^[5] In the New York Times Book Review, Angela Flournoy called it “an instantly essential text.”^[6] The Star Tribune opined that Broom's book had “essentially told the story of black America in one fell swoop.”^[7] Other publications to declare the book's importance included Publishers Weekly.^[8] and Kirkus Reviews^[9] Quoting the book itself, Kirkus Reviews opined that The Yellow House reflected the author's attempt 'to reckon with 'the psychic cost of defining oneself by the place where you are from,' adding that 'Broom's lyrical style celebrates her family bonds, but a righteous fury runs throughout the narrative at New Orleans' injustices, from the foundation on up.'^[9]

In November 2019, The Yellow House won the National Book Award for Nonfiction.^{[10][11][12][13][14]} The book was named one of the top ten books of 2019 by both the New York Times Book Review^[15] and the Washington Post.^[16]The Yellow House won the John Leonard Award for Best First Book from the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Awards.^[17]

References[edit]

The Yellow House Sarah M Broom Reviews

1. ^Sarah M. Broom (August 13, 2019). The Yellow House: A Memoir (2019 National Book Award Winner). Grove Atlantic. p. 1. ISBN978-0-8021-4654-0.
2. ^ ^ab'The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom'. Grove Atlantic. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
3. ^Broom, Sarah M. (August 17, 2015). 'The Yellow House'. The New Yorker. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
4. ^'Hardcover Nonfiction Books - Best Sellers'. The New York Times. September 1, 2019. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
5. ^Garner, Dwight (August 5, 2019). ''The Yellow House' Is a Major Memoir About a Large Family and Its Beloved Home'. The New York Times. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
6. ^Flournoy, Angela (August 9, 2019). 'After Hurricane Katrina, How Do You Return Home When Home No Longer Exists?'. The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
7. ^Gibney, Shannon (August 9, 2019). 'Review: 'The Yellow House,' by Sarah Broom'. Star Tribune. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
8. ^'Nonfiction Book Review: The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom'. Publishers Weekly. April 26, 2019. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
9. ^ ^ab'The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom'. Kirkus Reviews. April 23, 2019. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
10. ^'National Book Awards 2019'. National Book Foundation. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
11. ^Italie, Hillel (November 20, 2019). 'Susan Choi, Sarah M. Broom win National Book Awards'. Associated Press. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
12. ^Malone Kircher, Madison (November 21, 2019). 'Sarah M. Broom's National Book Award Speech Will Make You Want to Call Your Mom'. Vulture. New York. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
13. ^'New Orleans author Sarah Broom wins National Book Award for memoir 'The Yellow House''. NOLA.com. November 21, 2019. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
14. ^Wappler, Margaret (November 20, 2019). 'Susan Choi and Sarah M. Broom win National Book Awards'. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved November 23, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
15. ^'The 10 Best Books of 2019'. The New York Times. November 22, 2019. Retrieved November 26, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
16. ^'Best Books of 2019'. The Washington Post. November 21, 2019. Retrieved November 26, 2019.CS1 maint: discouraged parameter (link)
17. ^https://www.bookcritics.org/2020/01/11/announcing-the-finalists-for-the-2019-nbcc-awards/

Sarah M. Broom’s debut book The Yellow Housereads like a multifaceted map, not just of a place but an expanse of time, marking both relationships and absences. Part scrapbook and part oral history, it is an expertly curated museum exhibit of Broom’s family history. It is also a portrait of New Orleans East across the last 100 years.

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Broom expertly starts from a time before she was born, enabling her to narrate her own birth and her early years. Through archival research, interviews, and her memories, Broom weaves a story that is wholly hers, without neglecting the lives of the many characters around her, including her mother, siblings, neighbors, and friends.

The memories and family tales recounted range from small, deeply personal moments—rich sensory descriptions of her surroundings on the day she put on her first pair of glasses—to the highly public and politicized. On the fourteenth anniversary of Katrina, Broom’s book not only remembers the disaster, but challenges readers to reckon with social and political structures in New Orleans that predated Katrina by over a century. Of the news coverage of that storm, she writes: “Those of us who were born to New Orleans already knew its underbellies. Storms, of all sorts, were facts of our lives. Those images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago knew.”

The Yellow House Sarah M Broom

The titular shotgun house in New Orleans East is one of the central characters in the book. Already sinking into the soft earth when Broom’s mother purchased it in 1961, the yellow house on Wilson Street was not in a glamorous enough part of the city to appear on maps, but it was sold with the promise of a bright future. Cleaved in two during the storm, the yellow house lives on in Broom’s search to determine who has a right to the property, raising questions of governance, jurisdiction, and inequality. This book is filled with questions. Most go unanswered, but they provide a thrumming energy. What do we mean when we say home? How does one find home beyond the physical? How do we create these sacred spaces and who do we hold tightly?

The memoir-historiography hybrid is largely successful at creating an intricate narrative of family and place, but the four parts of the book feel disparate. They are written in different modes and the naming conventions of the short chapters are not consistent. At times, these structural elements do not feel precise or intentionally lawless, which distracts from the momentum of the story.

The Yellow House Sarah M Broom Images Book

Early in the book, Broom writes what feels like a provocation, part promise and part warning: “When people tell you their stories, they can say whatever they want.” What seems to be an offhand axiom at the beginning of the book turns out to be a central tenet throughout. Her telling of her own story is a testament to what we have to hold onto after forces of nature destroy our lives: family lore, and the moments that hang in our memories.