One Book One New Orleans Announces 2021’s Community Read
Our community partner One Book One New Orleans has announced that this year’s community read will be The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom. We are excited to announce that this year, we are expanding our partnership by asking our customers to purchase copies of the book to donate to community members. If you purchase a copy to donate, you’ll get 5% off your entire purchase when you buy the book.
Your donation provides a copy of the book and an accompanying curriculum to adult education programs throughout the Greater New Orleans area, people in prisons throughout the southeast, and teenagers in juvenile justice facilities.
And of course, we hope you will purchase a copy of the book for yourself to read as well! Click the image of the book or any of the buttons below to purchase!
Make sure to join us virtually at 12:00PM CT on Monday, January 18 as One Book One New Orleans’ Executive Director, Megan Holt, joins us to talk about this year’s book and events. This event will livestream to our YouTube channel, Facebook page, and website.
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction
New York Times Bestseller
Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review
Named a Best Book of 2019 by the Washington Post, NPR’s Book Concierge, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Guardian, BookPage, New York Public Library, and Shelf Awareness
Named a Best Memoir of the Decade by LitHub
A brilliant, haunting and unforgettable memoir from a stunning new talent about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East.
In 1961, Sarah M. Broom’s mother Ivory Mae bought a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East and built her world inside of it. It was the height of the Space Race and the neighborhood was home to a major NASA plant―the postwar optimism seemed assured. Widowed, Ivory Mae remarried Sarah’s father Simon Broom; their combined family would eventually number twelve children. But after Simon died, six months after Sarah’s birth, the Yellow House would become Ivory Mae’s thirteenth and most unruly child.
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. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser-known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.