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'Though I've read countless novels, I had never read one like this ... told in a chorus of completely unexpected voices, as befits the first novel from a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter' - Washington Post.
Billy Beede, the teenage daughter of the fast-running, no-account, and six-years-dead Willa Mae, comes home one day to find a fateful letter waiting for her: Willa Mae's burial spot in LaJunta, Arizona, is about to be plowed up to make way for a supermarket.
As Willa Mae's only daughter, Billy is heiress to her mother's substantial but unconfirmed fortune—a cache of jewels that Willa Mae's lover, Dill Smiles, is said to have buried with her. Dirt poor, living in a trailer with her Aunt June and Uncle Roosevelt behind a gas station in a tumbleweedy Texas town, and pregnant with an illegitimate child, Billy knows that treasure could mean salvation. So she steals Dill's pickup truck and, with her aunt and uncle in tow, heads for Arizona with Dill in hot pursuit. While everyone agrees it's only polite to speak of getting mother's body and moving her to a proper resting place, it's well understood that digging up Willa Mae's diamonds and pearls will make the whole trip a lot more worthwhile.
The enormously accomplished fiction debut from Suzan-Lori Parks, the 2002 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Getting Mother's Body takes its place in the company of the classic works of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. But when it comes to an ingenious, uproarious knack for depicting the trifling, hard-luck, down-and-out souls who need a little singing and laughing and lying and praying to get through the day, Suzan-Lori Parks shares the stage with no one.
Pearl Cleage - author of What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day
... a story whose characters are as mysterious and sexy as lace curtains billowing at the bedroom window. Richard Russo - author of Empire Falls
Suzan-Lori Parks is a terrific writer whose characters don't so much talk to us as sing, full-throated, of their joys and miseries.
If you liked Getting Mother's Body, try these:
by Kathryn Stockett
Published 2011
Winner of BookBrowse's 2009 Reader Awards. Three extraordinary women start a movement that forever changes a small town in 1960s Mississippi, and the way women — mothers, daughters, caregivers, friends — view one another. The Help is a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't.
by James McBride
Published 2009
From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Color of Water comes a powerful page-turner about a runaway slave and a determined slave catcher.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading, you wish the author that wrote it was a ...
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