She Treads Softly: Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters by Bonnie Jo Campbell

W. W. Norton & Co.: 10/5/15
eBook review copy, 272 pages
ISBN-13: 9780393248456

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters by Bonnie Jo Campbell is a highly recommended well written collection of 16 short stories featuring tough, marginalized, deeply flawed working-class women who are in unbalanced and unhealthy relationships. Most of these stories are heart breaking and the characters acceptance of abuse is disturbing, albeit realistic.

Stories in the collection include:

Sleepover: Two teenage girls and their boyfriends
Playhouse: A young woman, who doesn't quite remember the previous night, hurts her arm when helping her brother fix a playhouse for her niece
Tell Yourself: A mother worries about her daughter
The Greatest Show on Earth: What There Was, 1982: Buckeye and Mike are in a relationship and in the circus.
My Dog Roscoe: Pregnant Sarah believes Roscoe, the stray dog she took in, is her deceased boyfriend Oscar.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: An inner monologue directed to the daughter of a dying woman who has had a stroke and is unable to speak.
My Sister Is in Pain: a sister in pain "Stabbing pain sixty hours a week as she bathes and medicates and tends to the needs and the pain of others for minimum wage, throbbing pain when she has a day off..."
A Multitude of Sins: An abused wife is caring for her dying husband in their home.
To You, as a Woman: What a woman might have to do to survive.
Daughters of the Animal Kingdom: A beleaguered woman biologists talks about her life.
Somewhere Warm: A woman wants to create a place of love for her family
My Bliss: things she married
Blood Work, 1999: A woman spends her life and inheritance giving to others.
Children of Transylvania, 1983: A woman and her sisters take a bicycle trip in Romania.
Natural Disasters: A baby shower takes place during a tornado warning
The Fruit of the Pawpaw Tree: a hot summer on the farm where work never ends

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of W. W. Norton & Co for review purposes.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.