Getting Mother's Body: A Novel
 

Getting Mother's Body: A Novel

by Suzan-Lori Parks

Like a country quilt, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks's spellbinding first novel, Getting Mother's Body, is pieced together from rags: short and slanted scraps of narrative recounted by various friends and members of the hard-luck Beede clan of Ector County, Texas. These sad, wily, bickering voices tell the story of Billy Beede--poor, unmarried, and pregnant--and her dead... (read more)

Top tags: fictionafrican americanafrican-americancontemporary fictionfemale author (all tags)

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Phyllis
  • Rated 5 stars

Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks's debut novel, Getting Mother's Body, has an affinity to William Faulkner's classic, As I Lay Dying, only this time, Parks has flipped the script in a couple of areas. First, instead of taking a body home to be buried, the characters are planning to exhume the remains of one high-strung, party girl/singer, Willa Mae Beede; and secondly, the characters are African American, the setting is 1963 rural Texas, and the lead character is Billy Beede, a poor pregnant,...

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Community:
  • Rated 3.86 stars
Amazon:
  • Rated 4.5 stars
 

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  • akhamil

    akhamil said:

    I don't know how but this book ended up on my bookshelf and sat there for the longest. I picked it up one day and was so very glad I did. It was funny, entertaining and I was connected with the characters to the very end...a very good read.

    posted Thursday, September 13 2007
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