Descend- First Steps

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But it is also about claiming your humanity and a sense of hope despite people trying their absolute hardest to strip someone entirely of both. As Annis arrives in New Orleans and endures the humiliations of the market and another horrific owner, she finds herself continually negotiating with Aza and other spirits competing for her devotion. As for the book itself: Grave Descend is short convoluted and fast moving thriller that was a nice way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Despite this dip in the third act and an ending that felt slightly less satisfying than I had hoped, Annis' journey is one worth taking.

For me the novel lacks both the stark urgency as well as the wondrous, almost magical clarity of Ward’s earlier novels. Her new novel has clearly not been rushed, and yet when reading it I couldn’t help wishing – to adapt Blaise Pascal – that she had taken the time to make it shorter. John McGregor is recruited to do a dive and salvage something from the wreck onboard a luxury yatch - Grave Descend. At times rejecting the spirit’s guidance and at other times seeking her protection, Annis begins to learn, through a careful piecing together of memory, how to create her own version of freedom.

Jesmyn Ward takes her readers back to the American South in the years before the Civil War in her new novel, Let Us Descend. Throughout the story, she is visited by the spirit who oversaw both her grandmother and mother before her. But anyone honest enough to consider the most grotesque elements of America’s foundation will find in these pages a relentless exploration of the misery that millions of people endured.Nothing is held back from her harrowing journey from the rice fields of North Carolina to the slave market of New Orleans and the punishing sugar plantation. Annis is living on a plantation as a slave and her mother gets sold away, soon Annis finds herself following in her mother's footsteps and being sold into the slave market.