Separated from her mother and everyone she loves by her enslaver, Annis tries to figure out what remains. A spirit, Mama Aza, has been following Annis's lineage for generations, waiting to be seen. When Annis's enslaver sells her to a plantation in New Orleans, five states away from her birthplace in Virginia, Mama Aza asserts her presence. Annis navigates surviving the brutalities of slavery while learning how to live a life of freedom on her own terms — and how that may involve divine intervention. Jesmyn Ward's Let Us Descend is as horrific as it is beautiful, the definition of grief itself. The way Ward manipulates language is as demanding of attention as Mama Aza; this novel is a force to be reckoned with.

Something that appealed to me on a narrative, structural level is the story's main points of tension. By default, slavery offers its horrors as a tension. Annis's ...