This book is arrestingly beautiful. It’s also brutal. In the words of Glennon Doyle Melton, from "Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed": “Life is brutal, but it’s also beautiful. Life is brutiful.” 

Jesmyn Ward’s latest novel is just that-- brutiful. It’s simultaneously a difficult and fast read; it oozes poetic language and magic realism. Each of the thirteen chapters reads like a short story within a larger narrative. 

Even though Let Us Descend is historical fiction and contains fantastical elements, it feels more real than most nonfiction narratives I’ve read about slavery in America. 

Annis is the child of an enslaved woman, whose mother descends from Africa, and her father is her “sire”-- the white man who owns her. His white children are her half-sisters. Annis’s mother teaches her from a young age that she, though born into slavery, is her own weapon. 

The spirits guiding Annis through rings of hell that mirror Dante’s inferno are both comforting and confusing to both the protagonist and the reader-- but maybe that’s the point. Annis’s path to survival is anything but clear, and it’s ultimately a journey she has to feel her way through on her own. 

Jesmyn Ward’s writing is one-of-a-kind, and the imagery and language presented here was often so poignant that I had to stop reading and just savor it (or allow myself to reflect on what happened for a period of time). When I first started reading, I’d read a chapter each night, then forcefully stop-- falling asleep while mulling over Annis’ fate and Ward’s language. This is a heavy novel, and it’s often hard to keep going. Though once I grew accustomed to this “brutiful” heaviness, I couldn’t put it down. 

As soon as I finished "Let Us Descend," I felt compelled to read it again-- to allow myself to savor the magically painted words once more. That said, many of the hardships presented here are tough to read once, let alone a second time. If it’s this hard to read it, what was it like for Ward to write it? I wonder if writing such a visceral novel is traumatic, cathartic, or both. And most importantly, how is it possible that millions of enslaved people experienced such daily abuse and somehow survived? Ward’s novel will make your heart ache for fictional Annis and the other (fictional) brave, captured people in her world, but it will also give you new, unflinching insight into the very real people and the very real atrocities they experienced at the hands of their captors. 

The fact that much of the novel takes place in and around New Orleans, made it hit closer to home for me. I’ve visited slave auction landmarks in the French Quarter and sugarcane plantations outside of the city, where I learned about the grueling harvests in the killer cane fields. The scenes Ward paints here allowed those inhumane, gruesome realities to come to life for me. As Ward so brutifully writes, “No life here, no soft touch but in recollection, recollection that floats high above the dreamers, churning with sorrow, with remembrance. It deepens in the quiet.” 

If I could, I would give this book 6 stars out of 5. This book is like none other, and everyone should read it.