From Publishers Weekly
An engaging portrait of a possessive mother and her obedient daughter, limned against a larger canvas depicting women's roles in southern society. Author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From Library Journal
This episodic novel, Gibbons's third, is set during the Depression in back-country Virginia and Kentucky. In 19 vignettes, Betty Davies Randolph reveals her childhood and her mother's life along Milk Farm Road. Gibbons, winner of several literary awards for her first novel Ellen Foster ( LJ 4/15/87), has captured magnificently the dailiness and sense of community of rural life--from midwives and WPA ballads to suicides and men gone wild. Southern, and full of the folk wisdom of generations, Gibbons's voice reveals life's truths: "Listen and hear what men call their wives. . . . It's easier without a mother at a borning. . . . The ears are the most important parts of a baby." Times are tough--Betty's father kills himself and is found upside down on his head in the river with "rocks on either side, like bookends"--but the women are amazingly resilient; they help each other survive. As an old woman, Betty dies in "her chair talking, chattering like a string-pull doll," but the reader is assured that the storytelling will go on through her daughter and "the sounds of the women talking." Recommended.
- Doris Lynch, Oakland P.L . , Cal.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
