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Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories
Current price:
$25.95
Publication Date: October 5th, 2015
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN:
9780393248456
Pages:
272
This collection is Campbell at her best and most audaciously appealing. At the center of each of these stories is a fierce, floundering, and unmistakably familiar woman. Mother of a daughter in some instances but always a caretaker, aware of and struggling with a hellish truth, or at justified peace with her right to impose her flawed self on a tragic other. These women's violations -- both endured and perpetrated -- are most certainly recognizable, and their stories are stunning. Booksellers, tell your customers. Friends, tell your people. Mothers, tell your daughters. Read this book!
October 2015 Indie Next List
Description
From the author of National Book Award finalist American Salvage comes a dazzling and suspenseful new story collection.
Named by the Guardian as one of our top ten writers of rural noir, Bonnie Jo Campbell is a keen observer of life and trouble in rural America, and her working-class protagonists can be at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny. The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop of all the men in their world. Such richly fraught mother-daughter relationships can be lifelines, anchors, or they can sink a woman like a stone.
In "My Dog Roscoe," a new bride becomes obsessed with the notion that her dead ex-boyfriend has returned to her in the form of a mongrel. In "Blood Work, 1999," a phlebotomist's desire to give away everything to the needy awakens her own sensuality. In "Home to Die," an abused woman takes revenge on her bedridden husband. In these fearless and darkly funny tales about women and those they love, Campbell’s spirited American voice is at its most powerful.
Praise for Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories
Like the women in her stories, Campbell’s prose can be watchful and viscerally alive.
— New York Times Book Review
Bonnie Jo Campbell is a master of rural America’s postindustrial landscape…. Shine each story does, just like two laughing showgirls who, Campbell writes, ‘without wigs and makeup, dressed in their jogging shorts and tanks…seemed like carefree teenage boys.’
— Boston Globe
The book thrums with powerful young women.
— Chicago Tribune
It's a hard-luck, hardscrabble life in the world of Bonnie Jo Campbell's stories, a landscape that's as fertile as it is unforgiving, where families crop up and wither with the weather but manage some piquant humor and moments of worthy reckoning along the way.
— Minneapolis Star Tribune
With grit and reverence, this story collection is gorgeous in its honesty.
— Marie Claire
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters is filled with shifts…when a turn of fate, a moment in nature, brings surprises and revealing insights. And within the turmoil and the troubles, the demands and the limits of life, Campbell reminds us, there are possibilities for moments of grace.
— NPR Online
What it comes down to, in Campbell’s world and in ours, is that to be female is to fight all kinds of trouble with all kinds of strength.
— Oprah Magazine
Campbell grounds us in such graphic grit, making these lives so bitterly, relentlessly real, we want to reach through the pages and pull them to safety—aware, alas, that many would firmly refuse rescue.
— San Francisco Chronicle
