Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
From the National Book Award finalist and author of Once Upon a River comes a dazzling story collection featuring ferocious mothers and scrappy daughters.

The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters love and betray one another; their richly fraught relationships can act as anchors, lifelines, or deadly poison. Bonnie Jo Campbell's working-class protagonists are at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny, and they are always getting into or out of trouble.

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 has created characters that will capture the hearts and minds of her readers.
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Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
From the National Book Award finalist and author of Once Upon a River comes a dazzling story collection featuring ferocious mothers and scrappy daughters.

The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters love and betray one another; their richly fraught relationships can act as anchors, lifelines, or deadly poison. Bonnie Jo Campbell's working-class protagonists are at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny, and they are always getting into or out of trouble.

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 has created characters that will capture the hearts and minds of her readers.
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Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Narrated by Christina Delaine

Unabridged — 8 hours, 56 minutes

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Narrated by Christina Delaine

Unabridged — 8 hours, 56 minutes

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Overview

From the National Book Award finalist and author of Once Upon a River comes a dazzling story collection featuring ferocious mothers and scrappy daughters.

The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell Your Daughters love and betray one another; their richly fraught relationships can act as anchors, lifelines, or deadly poison. Bonnie Jo Campbell's working-class protagonists are at once vulnerable, wise, cruel, and funny, and they are always getting into or out of trouble.

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 has created characters that will capture the hearts and minds of her readers.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Emily Eakin

Campbell's stories are populated mainly by country dwellers, farmers and blue-collar workers who live in semi-isolation near Kalamazoo, Mich., Campbell's hometown. They coexist with animals as much as with other human beings, and like animals, they are adaptive and resilient. Campbell, who grew up on a farm, paints them with unpitying fascination…All of the protagonists of these stories are women, and Campbell would have us remember that with respect to relations between the sexes, brutality and violence are part of our animal legacy. Some of the freshest stories are ones in which she pursues this insight while allowing her absurdist humor free rein…Like the women in her stories, Campbell's prose can be watchful and viscerally alive. It's no accident that injuries and hospitals figure repeatedly here. She wants to drill down beneath the flesh, to hidden depths of feeling and being, to reservoirs of strength and power that these women hardly know are there.

The Oprah Magazine O

"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."

Marie Claire

"With grit and reverence, this story collection is gorgeous in its honesty."

San Francisco Chronicle

"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."

New York Times Book Review

"Like the women in her stories, Campbell’s prose can be watchful and viscerally alive."

Chicago Tribune

"The book thrums with powerful young women."

Boston Globe

"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.’"

Minneapolis Star 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."

Oprah Magazine

"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."

NPR Online

"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."

Kirkus Reviews

2015-07-15
Campbell's latest (Once Upon a River, 2011, etc.): a powerful but uneven collection focused on the experiences of working-class Michigan women. She covered much the same ground in American Salvage (2009), a National Book Award finalist, but still has plenty of fresh insights, as evidenced in the collection's three standout entries. The title story is a searing first-person monologue by a woman dying of lung cancer, talking back in her head to the reproachful, college-educated daughter who blames her for sharing her life with a parade of violent men who brutalized her children as well. "When I had a voice," she muses in the wrenching climax, "I didn't know how much I wanted to say to you, to explain how I lived my life the way I could." "A Multitude of Sins," by contrast, is the scary but gratifying account of an abused wife who finally gets her own back with the mortally ill husband who can no longer hurt her. The most nuanced and complex tale gently profiles Sherry, who has spent years trying to create "Somewhere Warm" for her family, a refuge totally different from "the bitter place where Sherry grew up, where people humiliated one another, where the power of love did not hold sway." Instead, her smothering embraces drive away her husband, her lover, and her angry teenage daughter, though a tender ending offers tentative hope. Campbell's protagonists are tough but heartbreakingly vulnerable; an appalling number have been molested as children or raped as adults, and they rarely seek justice since nothing in their experiences suggests it's attainable for them. The very modesty of their dreams—"Our own home, a comfortable, well-lit place nobody can take away from us, where each of us has our own room and closet," yearns the narrator of "To You, as a Woman"—indicts the society from which they expect so little. A fine showcase for this talented writer's ability to mingle penetrating character studies with quietly scathing depictions of hard-pressed lives.

Product Details

BN ID: 2940171333218
Publisher: HighBridge Company
Publication date: 10/05/2015
Edition description: Unabridged
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