In her debut, The Yellow House, Sarah Broom insightfully examines the history of New Orleans East, the city’s predominantly Black, working-class suburb, through the lens of her family’s fraught attempt to build a stable life there. Broom begins her work by sketching detailed portraits of her grandmother, parents, and older siblings, before recounting her turbulent youth spent in New Orleans East in the titular yellow house. The last of twelve children, she grew up fatherless, with an overworked mother, inside a home in desperate need of repair; for much of the book she considers how her struggles growing up embodied those afflicting her community. Later, she muses about the devastation and displacement Katrina wrought on her family, and she describes her ongoing effort to reckon with her past and understand her relationship to the city she fled upon coming of age. In mesmerizing prose Broom contemplates everything from what it means to belong to a place to how to tell the story of a city, and she connects her family’s experiences to broader social conflicts and cultural trends. The memoir’s many things at once, and always brilliant.

Intense. Intimate. This storytelling reaches out from its pages and grips the reader with a powerful tale of family, place, and history. Sarah Broom's description of her siblings, mother, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends and distant relatives are deeply recognizable to anyone who has worked or lived alongside of the people who have held this city together even as their rights are restricted in every sector of its society.

I found THE YELLOW HOUSE to read more like a memoir, opening the eyes of those of us on the outside of place, race, identity, inequality, and even shame. Yet, under the shambles of disarray and heartache, lie a tenacity, a hope for future generations, for transformation. This is a must read for teens as well as adults.

Sometimes memoirs get their strength not from the stories of the author but from the stories of the people that surround them. Sarah M. Broom has been infinitely impacted by growing up with 12 brothers and sisters in a yellow house in New Orleans East. The story truly comes to life when Broom recounts the events that have affected her family (especially Hurricane Katrina). I felt the most connected to Broom's story when she included lines from her mother - these italicized lines inserted in the text gave an extra perspective that colored the book with an added grace and heart.

There were some stories that felt superfluous - such as the section that described Broom's journey to live in Africa (any stories away from the yellow house and her siblings left me feeling disconnected). Because of this excess, I did feel that the book dragged in some places. However, Broom is a natural storyteller that isn't afraid to dig deep into the painful truths that existed in her family and in her hometown. Her imagery was so precise that I feel like this could easily be turned into a movie. Her family's struggles and triumphs are worth exploring even more as the years progress.

Though I’m very late to reviewing this one, I really enjoyed it! It kept me interested, and I would recommend it to anyone who dabbles in this genre.

I loved learning about Sarah Broom's family. She is such a good story teller. I will be reading everything else she writes. It was a fascinating look into New Orleans, in a positive and negative way. Loved it. Have suggested it to so many people.

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom

I enjoyed reading this memoir about Broom as well as her family. In the memoirs I have read, it is usually about the life of that particular individual, but with this one I was interested to learn the history of Broom’s family as well as the Yellow House they lived in.

I liked the way that social determinants were intertwined into this story. It added an additional aspect that usually is not seen in memoirs.

There were some times when I felt a bit confused as to which person was related to who, and I think that having a family tree of some sort would be helpful.

Finally, I greatly loved hearing about Broom’s experiences abroad and getting into the work force. I am personally trying to work in similar fields as those she worked in abroad and it was fascinating to hear about it from her perspective.

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic Books for the ARC e-book.

Despite all the press about this book, I found it unengaging. It attempts to tell the story of the United States through a family, and in that ambition, I think it fails. The stories of the family members are individually compelling, but I was disappointed in the sum of their stories. Perhaps my expectations were set too high.

Such a beautifully written memoir and deep meditation on home and full-hearted portrait of New Orleans. I look forward to reading much more of Broom’s work.

A supremely moving story of a place I know well, from a perspective I know less well. At every juncture, each ribbon of memory recollected here, I felt the incredible amount of consideration that Broom put into her experience, in order to relate it for others to understand. When people talk about the Water, it usually veers to one side or the other: the Before or the After. This book brings to light both sides, as well as the During, in scintillant light. Not forgetting the imperfections (a gross understatement of a word), Broom has produced a book that transcends the cult glorification of New Orleans and instead holds a city accountable for all facets of its being, for better or for worse. Thank you, NetGalley and Grove Press, for offering the opportunity to read this volume in advance of its release.

Powerful memoir about growing up impoverished in the titular yellow house in New Orleans. (This review is probably too short for NetGalley.)

This book is a powerful reflection on the injustice and destruction that Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans wreaked on a yellow house in a blighted area of the city. Broom invites the reader to become a part of her family as they navigate finding home post-Katrina after their house is destroyed by city officials. Her writing is humorous yet tender, serious yet personal.

Sarah Broom's deftly constructed memoir is a book to relish. The history of her family is meticulously transcribed and shines a light on their intricate relationships. You do have to have total focus when keeping track of all the details.
What's especially fascinating is how Broom weaves New Orleans and the mythic Yellow House into the pages. It is certainly a poignant and important story.

No surprise at all that this book has won so many awards. A personal and sociological story of place and of a history that is often overlooked. Fantastic in all ways!

DNF at 10% - I thought this was a memoir specifically about Hurricane Katrina. Turns out that's only a small portion of a long history of a family in New Orleans. While the writing is skilled, but the pace is extremely slow and I couldn't stay interested.

One of my favorite memoirs of the year! I loved that the memoir aspect was paralleled against a social history of New Orleans East, and that we got so many insights into the regional complexities. It is also so compellingly written, I found I flew through this!

Sarah M. Broom's memoir/history The Yellow House is at its best when it focuses on her family. The early chapters in particular are energetically written, as if Broom is desperate to put her ancestors' lives down on paper before her sources and research materials fade away. Adequately rendering your individual relationships with your 11 siblings, not to mention your mother, aunts, etc., on paper is no easy task, but Broom succeeds, and at under 400 pages.

For me, the detour into Broom's time in Burundi nearly stops the book dead in its tracks. I felt it belonged in another memoir. However, reading interviews with Broom helped me understand her including this part of her life.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for providing an ARC in exchange for this review.

I ran a positive wire review of the book in our 11 print sections of the Southern California News Group.

The Yellow House is the central character in this book. The house Sarah Broom grew up in, was destroyed in Katrina, and before and afterwards continues to be a central pole in her life. Broom’s large and complex family with its multi-generational brothers, sisters, aunties and cousins, lived in New Orleans East. Largely abandoned by the city government in favor of the tourist drawing French Quarter, her neighborhood was disproportionately impacted by Katrina. While her family physically survived the hurricane and its aftermath, its effects were profound and long-lasting.

I was fascinated by this modern history of New Orleans.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom was #unputdownable for me. This memoir takes place in 1961, when widowed, Ivory Mae (Boom’s mother) buys a shotgun house in the then-promising neighborhood of New Orleans East. Ivory Mae remarried Simon Broom (Sarah’s father) and becomes a widow for the second time, when Simon dies six months after Sarah’s birth. Now with twelve children to raise on her own the yellow house becomes more than just a house, it become the heart and soul of this family.

The Yellow House is a history of New Orleans as seen through one loving family. Broom weaves memories of her own extended and immediate family members and quoting them word for word, taking it as far back as her great-grandmother and her grandmother, Lolo. I loved every bit of this story, Its engrossing and funny. I promise you won’t want to put this one down. It’s a must read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

On one level, “The Yellow House” by Sarah M. Broom is the story of one house in New Orleans East and the family who made it their home for over 40 years. But it is so much more—the story of the city of New Orleans and the ways it both burrows into its residents’ souls and betrays them and their loyalty over and over again; the story of the toll poverty and racism takes on black Americans; the story of Katrina and climate change and the catastrophic results of poor urban planning. “Remembering is a chair that it is hard to sit still in,” Broom writes, and yet she does so beautifully, taking the reader back to her family’s roots in the New Orleans of the early 20th century under Jim Crow and segregation, through her mother Ivory Mae’s marriages and her siblings’ births in the 50s and 60s and the purchase of what became known as “the yellow house” in 1961.

These early sections are necessary for placing the story of the house within the context of the family, the city, and the times—and Ivory Mae is a compelling central character—but it is when Broom’s own narrative voice and memories take over following her birth in the waning hours of 1979 that “The Yellow House” really comes into its own. Broom’s descriptions of her childhood and particularly her memories of her childhood friend, Alvin—“Our relationship is so long that I cannot remember ever first meeting. He is hide-and-go-seek in wet summer air and five-cent Laffy Taffys with knock-knock jokes on the wrapper”—are both universal and unique to her, and are particularly poignant in light of Alvin’s early death, which Broom has already noted and which give these memories the air of elegy.

No book about New Orleans covering the year 2005 can avoid mention of Hurricane Katrina, and “The Yellow House” is no exception, as Broom describes her family’s evacuation experiences and the harrowing stories of two of her brothers who chose to ride out the storm. These passages make the horror of Katrina and the incompetence of the rescue efforts viscerally real, but what I found more powerful was the narrative of her family’s exile and displacement in the hurricane’s aftermath that begins where most Katrina narratives end. The Yellow House, and Broom’s family’s sense of place and of belonging, were additional victims of Katrina, and the city’s Road Home program—a “massive failure for most applicants, a dead end, a procedural loop, bungled and exhausting, built to tire you out and make you throw up your hands”—takes 11 years to finally settle with Ivory Mae, a final betrayal which seems a fitting place to end “The Yellow House.”

There’s so much more in this book that I can’t encompass in a review. Read it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Grove Press for providing me with an ARC of this title in return for my honest review.