Mudbound

Six actors narrate Jordan's Bellwether Prize-winning novel, delivering a top-notch performance. Kate Forbes shines brightest as Laura McAllan, who is uprooted from her urban life in Memphis when her husband purchases a farm in Mississippi. The actors in the production are particularly skilled at using their voices to reflect the nuances of power, race, gender, and the struggle to survive. The only low note is Brenda Pressley's turn as Florence, a worker on the McAllan's farm. Jordan describes Florence as a woman of preternatural strength, yet her voice doesn't reflect that. Otherwise, every actor feels starkly real in this production, creating a vivid listening experience that depicts the ravages of oppression. J.T. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

November 5, 2007
Jordan's beautiful debut (winner of the 2006 Bellwether Prize for literature of social responsibility) carries echoes of As I Lay Dying
, complete with shifts in narrative voice, a body needing burial, flood and more. In 1946, Laura McAllan, a college-educated Memphis schoolteacher, becomes a reluctant farmer's wife when her husband, Henry, buys a farm on the Mississippi Delta, a farm she aptly nicknames Mudbound. Laura has difficulty adjusting to life without electricity, indoor plumbing, readily accessible medical care for her two children and, worst of all, life with her live-in misogynous, racist, father-in-law. Her days become easier after Florence, the wife of Hap Jackson, one of their black tenants, becomes more important to Laura as companion than as hired help. Catastrophe is inevitable when two young WWII veterans, Henry's brother, Jamie, and the Jacksons' son, Ronsel, arrive, both battling nightmares from horrors they've seen, and both unable to bow to Mississippi rules after eye-opening years in Europe. Jordan convincingly inhabits each of her narrators, though some descriptive passages can be overly florid, and the denouement is a bit maudlin. But these are minor blemishes on a superbly rendered depiction of the fury and terror wrought by racism.