The Yellow House (Grove, $26), by Sarah M. Broom, is an extraordinary memoir of family and place. Broom, the youngest of twelve children, recounts growing up in New Orleans in a shotgun house in the then promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. While some in her family succumbed to drug and alcohol abuse, coupled with extreme poverty, Sarah went to college and had a career that took her around the world. She always returned home, though. The ramshackle yellow house remained the family’s anchor. But after Hurricane Katrina lashed New Orleans, the house,
along with many others, was washed away in the floods. It survives in Broom’s telling—a symbol of a way of life in a particular time and place. In telling the story of her remarkable family, past and present, Broom captures a spirit that couldn’t be erased by Katrina.