Consumer Critique: Aftermath Lounge

Disclosure: I received complimentary products to facilitate this post. All opinions are my own.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Aftermath Lounge: A Novel in Stories (Calypso Editions) is a collection of ten interwoven stories that follow the people of Gulf Coast Mississippi in the five years following Katrina. Author Margaret McMullan received a National Endowment for the Arts to complete it and bases the novel loosely on her family’s historic home in Pass Christian, MS.

The book is somewhat disjointed at first, as the stories are pretty much able to stand alone. But as I read further in, the connections became deeper, and it left quite the picture of the broken homes and families that had to make things work long after the news cameras disappeared. Some of the stories were heartwrenching, others inspiration, and overall it provides a good picture of the type of things that went on as people picked up their lives and tried to recover.