Book Club Monday: Let Us Descend

Author: Jesmyn Ward Title: Let Us Descend Publisher: Scribner Date Published: 10/24/2023

Read Dates: 02/03/2025- 02/09/2025
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐💫

This was my book club pick for February.

Let Us Descend is a single POV historical fiction with magical realism. Annis is a young woman, born into slavery and raised on the stories of her warrior ancestors. Separated from her mother, and then her lover, she is sold to a harsh life near New Orleans. She makes contact with various spirits and uses them to guide her as she tries to make a life for herself.

This was so beautifully written and heart wrenching. It was an incredibly moving story but difficult to read due to the subject matter. I felt drawn to Annis and was hopeful she would find a life of freedom.

“‘Let us descend,’ the poet now began, ‘and enter this blind world.’” — Inferno, Dante Alighieri

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.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land—the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps, and rivers of the American South. Let Us Descend is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.