The Yellow House

Even if you've been to New Orleans, it's unlikely you've been to New Orleans East, a sprawling tract reclaimed from marshland in the '60s but suffering from neglect even before Katrina swept many residents and businesses away. Broom was raised there, in the Yellow House of the title, the youngest child of her mother's twelve, and her memoir—lovely, insightful, and sprawling in its own way—captures her sense of dislocation as part of a vibrant and close-knit family that nevertheless scatters to all corners of the country, whose only toehold in their vibrant city becomes, after the storm, a vacant lot in a part of the city not even half-heartedly rebuilt.