Descend- First Steps

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Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? Descendants 3: Good to Be Bad • Queen of Mean • Do What You Gotta Do • Night Falls • One Kiss • My Once Upon a Time • Break This Down • Dig a Little Deeper If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month.

Thank you to Scribner and NetGalley who provided me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All the thoughts and opinions are my own.HOOK - 1 stars: >>>"Starting in the early dawn light, he had driven up into the mountains...then don through lush valleys...damp in the misty morning wetness...up once more to the cold air of the peaks..."<<< opens this novel. PLOT - 2: Standard diamond heist, jewels hidden in imported statue and brought to Jamaica via a private yacht. If it weren't for a twist, I'd go with one star: this plot has been done and done. I loved this book despite the tears and the disgust at the truths it holds. Read it. Every word is worth your time. Because beyond the interest of reading early works of your favourite author, reading what he wrote and seeing his writing slowly evolving, they are not masterpieces and you cannot dedicate more than five lines for their sake. It's like Schwarzenegger movies. You are having a good time and that's it. And I also didn't want to confuse you every second day with a new book by Crichton. Pretty soon, though, her mother is sold, Annis is alone, and then she herself is chained to her fellow enslaved people and taken on a long trek to Louisiana. The world is rendered in a careful lyrical style – the march is “this wide, cry-choked hell”; Annis’s light complexion is “the middle mud of my skin” – but this is where the trouble for the reader begins. There is a genuinely exciting escalation of action and struggle toward the end

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. As Ward herself states on the cover of my advanced copy by way of introduction, "It is difficult to walk south with Annis. Her narrative descends from one hellscape to another, but I promise that if you come with me, you will rise. It will be worth the walk, worth the walking." In 1972, with The Terminal Man under his own name, he realised that his career was now a writer, not a doctor, so he put the pseudonym in the bottom drawer. For cost savings, you can change your plan at any time online in the “Settings & Account” section. If you’d like to retain your premium access and save 20%, you can opt to pay annually at the end of the trial. Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Whew. The writing is superb. I believe I have exhausted all the adjectives that describe prose, and so I’ve coined a new term that kind of encapsulates all the great things we say about prose. And that term is prosey. Yes, when you want to say the prose is fabulous, fantastic, poetic, lyrical, otherworldly, now I’ll just simply say the prose was prosey!!! And in the case of Jesmyn Ward and this book, she is at the tippy top when it comes to prose. A year in which he published for the first time under his own name one of his best novels, the science fiction thriller The Andromeda Strain, which was made into a film in 1971.