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    Getting Mother’s Body
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    Getting Mother’s Body
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    Getting Mother’s Body
    Ebook344 pages4 hours

    Getting Mother’s Body

    By Suzan-Lori Parks

    3.5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    The debut novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks is a gutsy, funny, tragic and completely original work for fans of William Faulkner and Alice Walker.

    In the 1950s, in a small southern town in the US, the Beedes are the lowest of the low. Always struggling, they remain shackled by poverty and their own lack of ambition. Everyone, but sixteen-year-old Billie Beede.

    Billy Beede has big ideas about her life. She's had the Beede misfortune to get pregnant by an itinerant coffin salesman. And when he proves to have a wife and seven kids in another town, she determines to try her luck elsewhere. The answer seems to be in the hem of her mother's dress, her mother who died ten years ago. The rumour is that Willa Mae – a Billie Holiday look-alike – was the only Beede who made good, and was buried with a pearl necklace and a diamond ring sewn into the hem of her dress.

    Billie – and all her relatives – aim to get their hands on this treasure and make something of themselves. What follows is a mad road trip that evokes shades of Faulkner – in its potent earthiness – but also has the approachability and warmth of novels like The Colour Purple. This is a fantastic debut novel from an accomplished and well-loved American playwright.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJan 30, 2014
    ISBN9780007397174
    Unavailable
    Getting Mother’s Body
    Author

    Suzan-Lori Parks

    Suzan-Lori Parks is a well-known US playwright. She has won various awards for her plays, including a Pulitzer Prize, and was also the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" Grant. She currently lives in New York.

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    Reviews for Getting Mother’s Body

    3.5/5

    86 ratings8 reviews

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 1/5
      I didn't care about any of the characters.
    • 2/5
      I thought this would be a great book from the back cover...it received a really thrilling sounding review from Richard Russo and this author had won the Pulitzer for a drama she had written. I found it to be incredibly dull with characters that were all immensely unlikable. Set in a small Texas town in the 1960s, while some African Americans were traveling to D.C. to hear MLK forty years ago, others were apparently traveling around Texas to dig up the body of a mother buried with her jewels. Well, it's fiction thank God...and it was interesting t to see from the author's perspective how segregation and discrimination played its role in various southern towns. On the flipside, despite what good reviews it had received, it seemed incredibly dull reading. I guess I can sum it all up to say that when a book is written in alternating first person perspectives and all of the characters are as dumb as dirt, it doesn't make for a very engaging time of it. I realized the first page in I would hate this book but I hadn't brought anything else to the gym to read and I didn't want to watch TV so I was stuck. And then, when I had read 90 pages of it, I figured I may as well go and finish it.

      Not recommended.
    • 2/5
      Good little novel set in 1963 Texas. Pregnant girl sets out to recover the rumored treasure that is said to be buried with her mother. Story unfolds through short vignetted told from the different vignettes told from the different characters perspectives. Good quick read
    • 4/5
      Five months pregnant, Billy Beede heads up to Texhoma, Texas, to marry her fiance, Clifton Snipes, who designs individualized caskets for a living, Unfortunately, upon her arrival in Texhoma, Billy discovers Snipes' wife with baby #7 on the way.
    • 4/5
      humm..not sure how to go about writing a review for this book. It was just so different. I got really involved with the story and the characters but at the same time I felt that they could have been more fleshed out. I couldn't give it 5 stars only because I didn't enjoy the "song lyrics".
    • 4/5
      Interesting portrayal of life of black family in the south in the 60's. Written from many points of view, which was sometimes difficult to keep in mind, but did add interest to the story. Motives of characters sometimes difficult for me to understand.
    • 4/5
      I've never read anything by this author. The book jacket says she wonthe Pulitzer Prize for playwriters in 2002 for her play "TopDog/Underdog." I've never heard of it, either, so the only thing thatmade me pick this one up was the title.This is the story of a quest for buried treasure, set in 1963. WillaMae Beede was as fast as a race car when she was alive, going from loverto lover, doing whatever she felt like doing. She died after a badabortion, while her 10 year old daughter, Billy, looked on from thecorner of the room, hating her mother with everything she had in her.Willa Mae was buried in LaJunta, Arizona, by her lover Dill Smiles, inDill's mother's back yard, and she was buried with her most prizedpossessions, her diamond ring and her pearls.Six years later, Billy is living with her Aunt June and Uncle Rooseveltin a tiny trailer behind the gas station her Uncle runs in Lincoln,Texas. One day a letter arrives, telling Billy that her mother'sresting place is about to be plowed up and paved over to make a parkinglot for a new supermarket. Dirt poor and pregnant with an illegitimatechild, Billy knows that treasure is the only hope she has in this world,so she sets her mind to go to LaJunta, dig up her mother, and get thejewels. So, she steals Dill Smiles' pickup truck, talks her aunt anduncle into going with her, and heads for Arizona, with Dill in hotpursuit. Along the way, we meet some other members of the Beede familywho live between Texas and Arizona and the travelers stop to visit, eat,wash up and move on, with one of the family members in tow.This book is written entirely in the first person, with each chapterfrom another person's point of view. It's written in the vernacular,exactly as the people themselves would talk. Every character in thebook is black and Parks really captures the feeling of poor black peopleliving in the south in the early 1960s.I found this book pretty entertaining, but hardly engrossing. A coupleof plot twists along the way and a conclusion you aren't led to expectat the end. It was a nice change of pace and I enjoyed it. A pleasantway to pass a couple of summer afternoons.
    • 2/5
      I will start by saying that I really wanted to like this book better than I did. I was hopeful because the book started well. I was caught up in the different character's voice's, their dialect and phrasing set each character nicely apart as the narration duties swung from one character to the next. I could taste the dust of the Lincoln, Texas streets where the main characters lived in poverty and racial seclusion and feel the grit of their disappointed lives begin to come into focus. However as the story moved along, where the focus should have sharpened it instead became glassy-eyed. The ear for dialogue and the amusing antics that peppered the beginning began to pummel the ears and ring a tad hollow. Moments where the characters did ponder their lives felt forced into the last third of the book and were not so much delivered as the quiet revelations' they should have been but instead were stretched thin with too many words describing too little. And the ending felt tacked on like a hallmark card on an undertakers door. On the whole there were positives to be enjoyed but I think in this case, the author's history as a playwright of much renown has let her down. There were no actors to give weight where the characters needed it nor could they convey with a look what the author failed to do with a paragraph.