Reviews
The fierce women in the gorgeously ragged stories of Bonnie Jo Campbell's Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, are like rusted razor blades--damaged but still sharp enough to draw blood. With each of these brilliant and unforgettable stories, Campbell solidifies her place as one of the finest writers of contemporary fiction., Bonnie Jo Campbell is a master of rural America's postindustrial landscape.... Shine each story does, just like two laughing showgirls who, Campbell writes, 'without wigs and makeup, dressed in their jogging shorts and tanks...seemed like carefree teenage boys.', Bonnie Jo Campbell is a master of capturing a roiling central mystery of life: the way love and hate, sadness and hilarity, power and weakness are so often inextricably, tempestuously fused. Mothers, Tell Your Daughters is an exhilarating book by one of our finest writers., Campbell grounds us in such graphic grit, making these lives so bitterly, relentlessly real, we want to reach through the pages and pull them to safety--aware, alas, that many would firmly refuse rescue., Bonnie Jo Campbell is the real deal--a writer whose plainspoken characters I believe from the first word, even as I sometimes want to shout 'Oh God, No!' or even 'Why, Why, Why?!' I know why. I know these women. They are my cousins, nieces, neighbors. Some of them are me. What I don't know is how with such hard stories she invariably leaves me feeling strengthened. There is magic here. Read the stories and see for yourself., Bonnie Jo Campbell has some secret hocus-pocus going on here that births us for real real real humanity, yearning, leaping, chuckling, cussing, and embracing, while looking you and me right in the eye., Mothers, Tell Your Daughters is filled with shifts...when a turn of fate, a moment in nature, brings surprises and revealing insights. And within the turmoil and the troubles, the demands and the limits of life, Campbell reminds us, there are possibilities for moments of grace., What it comes down to, in Campbell's world and in ours, is that to be female is to fight all kinds of trouble with all kinds of strength., It's a hard-luck, hardscrabble life in the world of Bonnie Jo Campbell's stories, a landscape that's as fertile as it is unforgiving, where families crop up and wither with the weather but manage some piquant humor and moments of worthy reckoning along the way.
