Two words linger in my mind when I think of author Bonnie Jo Campbell, those two words are “hard realism” and ‘grit”. In Mothers Tell Your Daughters she give us a collection of short stories about women. From hard-luck stories of women living difficult lives to poignant stories that warm your imagination, these are tales to linger over as you puzzle out their layered meanings.

The author gives us varied and meaningful stories bout working class women that have humor, wit and grace. Her writing is both lyrically descriptive and uninhibitedly earthy. She writes about how her characters respond to emotional, financial and physical catastrophes and makes each situation unique with her empathetic and darkly humorous writing.

I enjoyed being immersed in Mothers Tell Your Daughters as this author excels in writing short stories. She captures life from all sides as she writes of mothers, daughters, sisters, cousins, nieces and neighbours as they struggle, cuss, and work through their heartbreak and sticky lives. Of course as in all collections of this nature, some stories spoke louder to me than others, but overall this was a very positive reading experience. ( )

Loved this book! Every story is like a glimpse into a person I haven't imagined before. ( )

Book on CD read by Christina Delaine

From the book jacket The strong but flawed women of Mothers, Tell your Daughters must negotiate a sexually charged atmosphere as they love, honor, and betray one another against the backdrop of all the men in their world. Such richly fraught mother-daughter relationships can be lifelines, anchors, or they can sink a woman like a stone.

My reactions
I think it was a mistake to read/listen to Campbell’s novel (Once Upon a River) back-to-back with this collection of short stories. I can take only so much distress, so much sexual tension and acting out, so much of watching women make bad choice after bad choice after even worse choice. There were a few stories that were quite funny in their hysteria – a young bride convinced her ex-husband was reincarnated in the mongrel dog she has adopted, or a pregnant woman imagining all the possible hazards (shoelaces, paperclips, the refrigerator…) her soon-to-be-born baby will face. But most were distressingly dismal and depressing.

And, frankly, I just have to wonder what kind of background the author has to write such gritty scenes – mothers virtually selling their daughters to a man, daughters overtly stealing their mothers’ boyfriends, rapes and molestations, cruelty and despair. Campbell took me to a dark place, and I’m glad to be out of there and back in the sunlight.

Christina Delaine does a very good job performing the audio version. She had a plethora of characters to portray and she was definitely up to the task. ( )

Mothers, Tell Your Daughters by Bonnie Jo Campbell is a highly recommended well written collection of 16 short stories featuring tough, marginalized, deeply flawed working-class women who are in unbalanced and unhealthy relationships. Most of these stories are heart breaking and the characters acceptance of abuse is disturbing, albeit realistic.

Stories in the collection include:

Sleepover: Two teenage girls and their boyfriends
Playhouse: A young woman, who doesn't quite remember the previous night, hurts her arm when helping her brother fix a playhouse for her niece
Tell Yourself: A mother worries about her daughter
The Greatest Show on Earth: What There Was, 1982: Buckeye and Mike are in a relationship and in the circus.
My Dog Roscoe: Pregnant Sarah believes Roscoe, the stray dog she took in, is her deceased boyfriend Oscar.
Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: An inner monologue directed to the daughter of a dying woman who has had a stroke and is unable to speak.
My Sister Is in Pain: a sister in pain "Stabbing pain sixty hours a week as she bathes and medicates and tends to the needs and the pain of others for minimum wage, throbbing pain when she has a day off..."
A Multitude of Sins: An abused wife is caring for her dying husband in their home.
To You, as a Woman: What a woman might have to do to survive.
Daughters of the Animal Kingdom: A beleaguered woman biologists talks about her life.
Somewhere Warm: A woman wants to create a place of love for her family
My Bliss: things she married
Blood Work, 1999: A woman spends her life and inheritance giving to others.
Children of Transylvania, 1983: A woman and her sisters take a bicycle trip in Romania.
Natural Disasters: A baby shower takes place during a tornado warning
The Fruit of the Pawpaw Tree: a hot summer on the farm where work never ends


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of W. W. Norton & Co for review purposes. ( )

MOTHERS, TELL YOUR DAUGHTERS: STORIES, by Bonnie Jo Campbell.

There are sixteen stories here and if there is any unifying theme to be found it may be that men are untrustworthy, lying, "cheating, troubling sons of bitches ("The Fruit of the Pawpaw Tree")." Which is, essentially, what mothers should probably tell their daughters. Because the women who tell these stories have all, in one way or another, been beaten, molested, raped, abused, and abandoned by men who took what they wanted and then left. And most of them, like Jill, an adjunct professor, mother of four daughters (the youngest unwed and pregnant), finds herself pregnant again at 47 by her faithless professor husband who dallies with young students, are "not feeling terribly sympathetic toward the male of any species just now" ("Daughters of the Animal Kingdom").

The women who are on the receiving end of this brutal-to-indifferent treatment react in various ways. Some are mostly passive, choosing to re-paint their lives in pastel colors of love, like Sherry, a single mother whose much younger lover runs off with Sherry's teenage daughter ("Somewhere Warm"). Then there is the unnamed narrator in "To You, As a Woman," who is treated like an animal, abused and raped, but keeps on doing whatever she has to do to take care of her two young children. Almost all of these women, of course, are going it on their own, discards of men, and often of society itself. Denizens of the hard-scrabble unemployed or just barely making ends meet, they are, many of them, struggling desperately to get by.."

My favorite here is a story that doesn't fit this mold, "Children of Transylvania, 1983" about a woman biking through Romania. Very different from the others.

Campbell established herself firmly as a spokesperson for broken, damaged, abused women in her earlier book, AMERICAN SALVAGE, and she continues to give them a voice in this new collection. She has an uncanny and unerring ear for the way these women speak, and gives voice to their most secret and unspoken thoughts. And despite the grim subject and settings, she also displays a dry and often ribald sense of earthy humor.

I like the way Bonnie Jo Campbell writes. She knows her subjects and she knows her way around a good sentence and the English language. It's her subjects and this unrelenting theme of "men as bastards" that makes me uncomfortable. Which makes me wonder if that makes her a "women's writer." Because I know other men who feel the same way about her work - uncomfortable, a bit squirmy, maybe. So here's the thing. This is five-star writing. But, frankly, I was just a bit relieved to come to the end of these stories. So I can't really say I loved it. Hence my 4 stars. Having said all this, highly recommended, because this woman can write! ( )