Sarah M. Broom's 2019 memoir traces her family's shotgun house in New Orleans East from the year her mother bought it, 1961, through Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters and the city's quiet, unceremonious demolition of the house in 2013 -- an event no family member witnessed because the city never told them it was happening. It won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction and landed on the New York Times Book Review's list of the year's ten best books, real, documented recognition rather than jacket-copy hype. This review covers what the book actually does structurally, why Broom wrote it, what critics said, the real Goodreads numbers, and the specific, sourced criticism about its demanding opening chapters -- so you know what $16.99 and a genuinely dense read actually buys you.
What The Yellow House Actually Is
This is not a conventional linear memoir, and that's worth knowing before you start. Broom structures the book around the house itself -- a small shotgun house in New Orleans East that her mother, Ivory Mae, bought in 1961, and where Broom, the youngest of twelve children, was raised. The narrative moves outward from that house in concentric circles: family history stretching back generations, the specific economic and political forces that shaped New Orleans East as a majority-Black neighborhood systematically underserved by the city, Broom's own young adulthood spent partly trying to escape New Orleans and partly being pulled back to it, and finally Hurricane Katrina, which flooded the house in 2005 and led, eventually, to its demolition by the city in 2013, carried out without any family member present or formally notified in advance.
Broom herself doesn't fully step into the narrative as an adult, first-person presence until well into the book -- by some readers' counts, more than a hundred pages in -- because she deliberately front-loads decades of family and neighborhood history first. That's a genre choice, not a flaw exactly: the book reads as part oral history, part urban history, and part memoir, refusing the more conventional structure of centering the author's own voice from page one. Whether that structural patience pays off or tests your attention is, as covered below, the single most consistent point of disagreement among readers.
About Sarah M. Broom and Why She Wrote This
Broom was born in New Orleans in 1979, the youngest of twelve children, and earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. Before writing this book she worked as a journalist, including a stint as the lead speechwriter for New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, and her essays and reporting have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Oxford American, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among other outlets. In 2016, she won a Whiting Award for Creative Nonfiction, a prize given to emerging writers of exceptional promise, and that award directly funded the time she needed to finish The Yellow House, her first book.
Broom has said she wanted to write against the flattened, disaster-tourism version of New Orleans East that dominated national coverage after Katrina -- a neighborhood most outsiders only ever heard about in the context of flooding and failure, rarely as a place with its own full, complicated, generations-deep history before the storm ever arrived. The house's demolition, carried out by the city without any family member present, became for her a kind of final, literal erasure of that history, and much of the book's urgency comes from her determination to reconstruct, in exhaustive and specific detail, exactly what and who existed there before the record was wiped clean.
How It Compares to Notes on a Nervous Planet
Where a book like Matt Haig's Notes on a Nervous Planet moves in short, essayistic bursts built for quick reading, The Yellow House asks for sustained, patient attention across a single, cumulative narrative arc. Both books blend personal experience with broader social and structural analysis, but Broom's approach is denser and more literary, closer to a hybrid of Isabel Wilkerson's structural history-writing and a traditional family memoir than to Haig's accessible, dip-in-and-out essay format. If you want nonfiction you can read in five-minute increments, this isn't that book; if you want nonfiction that rewards a real, sustained sitting, it delivers on that in a way few essay collections attempt.
What Critics Actually Said
Rather than inventing a verdict, here's what was actually published about it:
“A major book that I suspect will come to be considered among the essential memoirs of this vexing decade.”— The New York Times Book Review
“[Broom] pushes past the baseline expectations of memoir as a genre to create an entertaining and inventive amalgamation of literary forms… part oral history, part urban history, part celebration of a bygone way of life.”— The New York Times Book Review
That reception was backed by concrete recognition, not just favorable adjectives: the book won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction outright, was named one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2019, and became a New York Times bestseller -- an unusually complete sweep of literary-prize and commercial validation for a debut work of narrative nonfiction built around a single, unglamorous house in a neighborhood most of the country had already written off.
And the aggregate reader picture, for what it's worth:
Where Real Reviews Pushed Back
The most consistent, specific criticism concerns the book's demanding opening structure: multiple reviewers and readers note that Broom doesn't fully step forward as a first-person narrator until well past the hundred-page mark, after extensive family and neighborhood history, and that this front-loaded approach asks for real patience before the more conventionally memoiristic material arrives. One widely echoed piece of reader advice sums up the trade-off directly -- that the book could arguably be tightened by trimming some of the historical detail that isn't strictly essential to the central story, but that readers who trust the slow build are rewarded once the book, in that reviewer's words, "more than takes flight." This is a real, recurring critique from engaged, largely admiring readers, not a dismissal of the book's quality -- it's a genuine heads-up about pacing and structure that the award coverage alone won't tell you.
On New Orleans East and a City's Selective Memory
A significant part of the book's power comes from its refusal to treat New Orleans East as an afterthought to the more frequently mythologized French Quarter and Garden District versions of the city. Broom methodically documents how the neighborhood was developed, marketed, and then systematically underinvested in by the city over decades -- a pattern that predates Katrina by a long stretch and that the storm simply exposed rather than caused. That structural argument is woven directly into the family's story: the house's eventual demolition, carried out quietly and without notice, becomes for Broom a small-scale repetition of the same pattern of neglect and erasure the neighborhood experienced at a larger scale for decades before the water ever rose.
On Twelve Siblings, One Mother, and a House as Inheritance
Ivory Mae, Broom's mother, bought the house in 1961 as a young widow rebuilding her life, and the sheer scale of the family that eventually filled it -- twelve children across two marriages -- gives the book an unusually wide cast of siblings, each with a distinct relationship to the house and to New Orleans itself. Some stayed in the city permanently; others, including Broom, left for years at a stretch, pulled by ambition and pushed by the practical difficulty of building a life in a neighborhood the city had stopped investing in. The book treats the house less as a physical structure than as the fixed point every family member's story keeps returning to and measuring itself against, whether they're living two blocks away or, as Broom did for years, working in New York City and abroad.
On Katrina, Demolition, and What Gets Erased
Hurricane Katrina arrives roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, and Broom resists treating it as the story's central climax, even though it's the event most readers will already associate with New Orleans East. The house floods in 2005 and sits damaged and uninhabited for years afterward, a slow, unresolved wound rather than a single dramatic rupture, until the city finally demolishes it in 2013 -- an action taken without any Broom family member present, notified in advance, or given the chance to salvage anything from inside. That absence is the detail Broom keeps returning to: not that the house was destroyed, which happened to thousands of homes across the city, but that her family's specific history inside it was erased so casually, by a bureaucratic process that never treated the house, or the people who built a life around it, as anything worth pausing for. Writing the book becomes, in a very direct sense, Broom's attempt to put back on the record everything that quiet demolition tried to erase.
Key Takeaways
- The Yellow House genuinely won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction -- documented, real literary recognition, not marketing language
- Broom deliberately delays her own first-person narration until well into the book, front-loading family and neighborhood history first
- Her Whiting Award in 2016 directly funded the time needed to complete the book, her debut work
- The most consistent reader criticism concerns the demanding, information-dense opening stretch before Broom's own voice fully arrives
- The book argues New Orleans East was structurally underinvested in for decades before Katrina, not just abandoned because of the storm
Who This Book Is Actually For
Readers who want dense, literary narrative nonfiction that blends personal memoir with urban and social history -- particularly anyone interested in New Orleans beyond its tourist mythology, Hurricane Katrina's long aftermath, or stories about what a family owes to, and inherits from, a single physical home. It also rewards readers who appreciate journalism-grounded nonfiction, since Broom's background reporting and speechwriting shows up clearly in how carefully she documents the city's own policy decisions alongside her family's personal story.
Who Should Read Something Else Instead
If you want memoir that centers the author's first-person voice from the opening page, the documented criticism above about the delayed narrator is worth taking seriously -- this book asks for patience before it delivers that more conventional memoir experience. Readers who want a faster, more essayistic entry point into personal narrative nonfiction may be better served starting with something shorter and less structurally ambitious, and readers who specifically want the book to stay tightly focused on Katrina itself, rather than decades of surrounding family and civic history, should adjust their expectations before starting -- the storm is one chapter in a much longer story, not the book's sole subject.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- A genuine 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction winner, not just a strong seller
- Named one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2019
- Combines memoir, oral history, and urban history in a genuinely distinctive literary structure
- Gives New Orleans East a full, specific history rarely covered outside disaster-reporting contexts
- Backed by Broom's own journalism background, giving the reporting sections real rigor
Cons:
- Multiple readers report a slow, dense opening stretch before Broom's own first-person voice arrives
- Some reviewers suggest the book could be tightened by trimming non-essential historical detail
- The large cast of twelve siblings can be difficult for some readers to keep track of
Frequently Asked Questions
Did The Yellow House really win the National Book Award?
Yes. It won the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, a genuine, documented literary honor, not a marketing claim -- and it was also named one of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2019.
What's the actual Goodreads rating?
3.89 out of 5 from roughly 25,700 ratings as of this writing -- solid for literary nonfiction, though notably more modest than the award attention might suggest, which tracks with reader comments about its demanding structure.
Is this a memoir about Hurricane Katrina?
Partly, but it's broader than that. The book covers Broom's entire family history in the house going back to 1961, and Katrina -- which led to the house's demolition -- is a pivotal but not the only major event covered.
What's the most common criticism of this book?
That the opening stretch is slow and dense with family history before Broom herself, the narrator, even appears as a character -- some readers report waiting through more than a hundred pages before her own voice takes center stage.
Sources & Further Reading
- Goodreads — The Yellow House (aggregate rating, reader reviews)
- The New York Times Book Review
- National Book Foundation — 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction winner listing
- Grove Atlantic — publisher page
- PositiveLifes.com — free inspirational and life-changing PDF books
Final Verdict
The Yellow House backs up its National Book Award win with real, sustained literary ambition -- a memoir that refuses to shrink New Orleans East down to a Katrina headline and instead spends hundreds of patient pages rebuilding an entire family's, and a neighborhood's, full history before the water ever rises. The pacing criticism from readers is fair and worth knowing going in, especially if you want the author's own voice front and center from page one. But the reward for sticking with Broom's slower build is a portrait of home, inheritance, and civic neglect that more than earns the decade of essential-memoir status critics have already given it.
Buy Day rating: 8.8/10