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Sarah M. Broom rarely references Hurricane Katrina by name in her bracing debut memoir about her family and the little yellow house they owned in New Orleans East. Instead she refers to Katrina as the Water, giving the hurricane — which killed more than a thousand people and displaced thousands more — an almost biblical weight. It’s fitting. Katrina was a life-altering event for her family; it created a Before and an After. Broom gives both of these halves equal weight in The Yellow House, starting with her grandmother, who was sent away to live in a boarding house in the early 1900s and continuing on until the present day. The youngest of twelve children, Broom excavates her family history, relying on interviews and historical records to create a compelling story about a black working class family struggling to make ends meet.

Writing with extraordinary grace and thoughtfulness, she brings to vigorous life various members of her family — her fashionista sister Lynette, her protective older brother Carl, her dainty mother Ivory Mae. She also places her family history within the larger history of New Orleans, stripping the city of its mythos and thus making this memoir more ambitious, more definitive than most memoirs typically are.

“This is the place to which I belong,” Broom writes towards the end of the book, “but much of what is great and praised about the city comes at the expense of its native black people, who are, more often than not, underemployed, underpaid, sometimes suffocated by the mythology that hides the city’s dysfunction and hopelessness.” Get your copy now. —Tomi Obaro

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