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.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
Narrated by Christina Delaine
Bonnie Jo CampbellUnabridged — 8 hours, 56 minutes
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters
Narrated by Christina Delaine
Bonnie Jo CampbellUnabridged — 8 hours, 56 minutes
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Overview
*
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
08/03/2015
After 2011’s novel Once upon a River, National Book Award–finalist Campbell returns to the realm of food stamps, liquored nights, and deadbeat men in an aptly titled short story collection populated by beleaguered mothers and their tetchy, trouble-courting offspring. In “To You, as a Woman,” a gang-rape victim and single mother laments her later irresponsible choices and contemplates the fate of her two young children while waiting for STD lab results. The paranoid maternal figure in “Tell Yourself” drives away her new beau after wrongfully accusing him of showing an interest in her teenage daughter. In “My Dog Roscoe,” a hormonal and pregnant new bride imagines her dead ex-fiancé inhabiting the soul of a stray dog in need of adoption. The title story unfolds as a sprint-down-memory-lane rant from a hospice-bound, cancer-ridden woman to her daughter. “Forgive me, even if I can’t say I’m sorry,” she says—an apology uttered in one way or another by many of the mothers in this collection. Campbell has made a career chronicling the triumphs and hardships of the perpetually marginalized, with an acute talent for airing the dirty laundry of tough-as-nails, ill-treated women. And though this new batch traverses similar territory instead of, perhaps, something new, most of the stories succeed so thoroughly that it’s hard not to think: if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. (Oct.)
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"With grit and reverence, this story collection is gorgeous in its honesty."
"Like the women in her stories, Campbell’s prose can be watchful and viscerally alive."
"The book thrums with powerful young women."
"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.’"
"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."
12/01/2015
These dark stories of women's lives in rural Michigan are funny, poignant, and depressing by turns. Each tale tells of common conflicts and how family members fail one another, though they try hard and some eventually recognize mistakes they have made. Some of the stories present a "lady and the tiger" ending, leaving readers to wonder at the outcome and hope the protagonists can find their way to a positive ending All of the women and girls are strong characters, while many of the men skew closer to caricatures. Narrator Christina Delaine gives life to the various personae. VERDICT An enjoyable listen for those who enjoy gritty, hard-luck stories. ["Bittersweet stories of unbearable heartache, sadness, and sometimes love": LJ 8/15 starred review of the Norton hc.]—Cheryl Youse, Norman Park, GA
★ 08/01/2015
Strong writing holds the readers' attention in Campbell's collection of dark, offbeat stories. In the title piece, the narrator, who has survived much sorrow through toughness, tells her life story from a hospice bed. Her dying wish is for her kin to make her funeral a real bash. In "My Dog Roscoe," a woman suspects that a stray dog rescued by her husband is a reincarnation of her sexy former boyfriend, Oscar. When the dog exhibits behavior reminding her of Oscar, she talks to the dog as if he is Oscar, telling him more than once how he betrayed her. In "Daughters of the Animal Kingdom," 47-year-old Jill is pregnant with her fifth child, her mother has cancer, her youngest daughter is also pregnant, and her marriage is on the rocks. She compares herself to a queen bee past her prime who can no longer cling to life. Throughout, mothers and daughters struggle with bad luck, bad choices, and bad men; there's always an imbalance of power in their relationships, never in their favor. VERDICT Following critical acclaim for her novel Once upon a River, Campbell tells bittersweet stories of unbearable heartache, sadness, and sometimes love. She once explained to an interviewer that she wants to look honestly at whatever event is unfolding, and she has delivered that truthfulness in the stories in this exhilarating collection. [See Prepub Alert, 4/20/15.]—Donna Bettencourt, Mesa Cty. P.L., Palisade, CO
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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