Suzan-Lori Parks

I've been thinking about sibling rivalry and was taken in with the relationship between Lincoln & Booth. The course of this tragedy was not surprising however it left a deeper ache because it felt inevitable in some ways. Sort of like the set-up of 3-Card Monte, cycles of trauma that continue to repeat.

Parks’ writing here reads a lot like a play. I’m not sure what the qualities are that made me feel like that, but her background as a playwright sure felt like it came through. It’s a little heavier on dialogue than a lot of other books, and that talking is central to the story. This isn’t annoying in the "the characters just sit around talking" way. Most of it accompanies actions the characters take. Each short chapter is told from the perspective of a difference character, and a show more lot of the characters get a chapter or two. The reader really gets to get inside heads a lot. I liked that. And while it has a lot of substance that is just below the story’s surface, it never feels didactic or preachy.

Good reading to start off the year.

Full review: http://reading.kingrat.biz/reviews/getting-mothers-body-suzan-lori-parks show less

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. show more 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. show less

I picked this one up based on the review in Publishers Weekly. I wasn't sure starting off if I would like it. The 1960s southern dialect it's written in was a bit offputting (yr for your drove me nuts), but the darned book sucked me in.

Written in a series of first person chapters (every character seems to get his or her say), this is the story about a dirt poor extended black family with the focus on Billy Beede, a pregnant black teen whose husband prospects take a nosedive. The mother in show more the title is Billy's mother who died years ago and there's a reason, or two, to dig up her body and move her. Seems she was buried with a pearl necklace and diamond ring and Billy and her family could use the money so off they go. But it isn't that simple and it isn't about the treasure you can sell for cash. It's about the treasures deep in the human spirit and the things that can bring people together or pull them apart. Or so it seemed to me. All I know is that Billy, her plight, and her folks became very real to me and while I knew where things had to end up, the trip held enough surprises to keep me reading to see how it all turned out. There's some female empowerment, race relations, and sexual mores thrown in for good measure. I was not disappointed. show less