One Good Mama Bone
by Bren McClain
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Pub Date Feb 14 2017 | Archive Date Mar 13 2017
Description
Set in the early 1950s rural South, One Good Mama Bone chronicles Sarah Creamer’s quest to find her “mama bone” after she is left to care for a boy who is not her own but instead is the product of an affair between her husband and her best friend and neighbor, a woman she calls “Sister.” When her husband drinks himself to death, Sarah, a dirt-poor homemaker with no family to rely on and the note on the farm long past due, must find a way for her and young Emerson Bridge to survive. But the more daunting obstacle is Sarah’s fear that her mother’s words, seared in her memory since she first heard them at the age of six, were a prophesy: “You ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, girl.”
When Sarah reads in the local newspaper that a boy won $680 with his Grand Champion steer at the recent 1951 Fat Cattle Show & Sale, she sees this as their financial salvation and finds a way to get Emerson Bridge a steer from a local farmer to compete in the 1952 show. But the young calf is unsettled at Sarah’s farm, crying out in distress and growing louder as the night wears on. Some four miles away, the steer’s mother hears his cries and breaks out of a barbed-wire fence to go in search of him. The next morning Sarah finds the young steer quiet, content, and nursing on a large cow. Inspired by the mother cow’s act of love, Sarah names her Mama Red. And so Sarah’s education in motherhood begins with Mama Red as her teacher.
But Luther Dobbins, the man who sold Sarah the steer, has his sights set on winning too, and, like Sarah, he is desperate, but not for money. Dobbins is desperate for glory, wanting to regain his lost grand-champion dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to win. Emboldened by her lessons from Mama Red and her budding mama bone, Sarah is fully committed to victory until she learns the winning steer’s ultimate fate. Will she stop at nothing, even if it means betraying her teacher?
McClain’s writing is distinguished by a sophisticated and detailed portrayal of the day-to-day realities of rural poverty and an authentic sense of time and place that marks the best southern fiction. Her characters transcend their archetypes and her animal-as-teacher theme recalls the likes of Water for Elephants and The Art of Racing in the Rain. One Good Mama Bone explores the strengths and limitations of parental love, the healing power of the human-animal bond, and the ethical dilemmas of raising animals for food.
Mary Alice Monroe, a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of eighteen novels and two children's books, provides a foreword to the novel.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
"First-time novelist McClain draws on her family’s history in the rural South to create a cast of deeply relatable characters, both human and animal, who readers will find themselves rooting for until the very last page.”—Booklist, starred review
"Bren
McClain writes of elemental things with grace, wisdom, and power.
One Good Mama
Bone speaks with a quiet authority that comes through on every
page."—Ben
Fountain
"Emotional bonds between humans and animals have long been written about, but never has the bond between a woman and a mother cow been placed front and center. It’s about time. The world is ready for this true portrait of a mother cow’s compassion and the lessons she has to teach us all. This is an important story whose time has come."—Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary
“In spite of being an animal lover all my life and feeling the centrality of that love in how I see the larger world, I have never directly addressed that theme in my writing. I no longer have to. Bren McClain’s brilliant and ravishingly moving One Good Mama Bone speaks eloquently for all of us who find our deepest humanity intimately connected with all the sentient creatures around us. Humane and universal, One Good Mama Bone is an instant classic.”—Robert Olen Butler
Marketing Plan
A Southern Independent Booksellers’ Association Okra Pick
A Pulpwood Queen May 2017 Book Club Pick
A Southern Independent Booksellers’ Association Okra Pick
A Pulpwood Queen May 2017 Book Club Pick
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781611177466 |
| PRICE | $27.99 (USD) |
Featured Reviews
Kathleen D, Reviewer
“I’m bringing him back to you. This is your baby, not mine. Don’t you put this on me!”
The door does not open.
Sarah places her ear against the wooden surface and strains to hear Mattie’s footsteps inside., hear the creaks her barely one hundred pounds would make. But the baby’s cries do not allow for that.
Sarah kicks at the door and beats it with her fist, beats it hard. “I mean it, Mattie. I ain’t no Mama. You his Mama. Bet he’s got your dimples. Now come get him. Come get him now!”
Mama Bone is a beautiful title for the story about a woman named Sara Creamer who is left to care for the child, a product of an affair between her husband and her dear friend, Sister Mattie. She doesn’t have ‘one good mama bone’ according to her own mother, and yet she has no choice but to come and answer the cries of the abandoned baby. In poverty, she must scramble to raise Emerson Bridge when her husband dies in shame, unable to work, a drunk. With nothing to feed her son, desperation clings. There is shame in her heart that she doesn’t feel good enough as a mother, she isn’t his real Mama. She let the loving, come from Harold Emerson is HIS child, Sara doesn’t feel worthy, she can’t find the natural mothering bone. Her attempt to make a dress with fine material in the hopes of selling it to Luther’s wife is a gamble, but she is desperate to put food in her boy’s belly. Watching her sell is cringe worthy, as much as seeing her steal some food. That is what a real mother does! Sara, a heathen woman who doesn’t go to church, daring to make dresses for Mrs. Dobbins, and now wanting a steer? The nerve!
The only way to feed her son, and pay off debts is to win a competition (Fat Cattle Show and Sale) by purchasing a baby steer from Luther Dobbins. He will come to be their nemesis, as he hungers to keep the champions in his own family with his son LC in the competition. Surely this poor woman isn’t a threat, right? Certainly Sara has no clue what she is doing, nor how to feed the steer but Mama Red is going to come crashing into their lives and back into her baby. Through this animal love, the inborn hunger for the cow to protect and shower her baby with love, Sara will learn how motherly love is measured. The reader also understands through Luther, what love is not and how hunger for always winning can diminish a child. Ike Thrasher is a vital character too that comes into Sara and Emerson’s life, dragging his own terrible past behind him. He wants to help, to be worthy.. it’s interesting how so many characters are trying to reach for worthiness in the eyes of their family, how parents can blindly make their children feel they will never measure up, sometimes with horrific consequences.
While this is about a rural town, the characters are not living simple lives. The novel begins with blood and may well end with it. Everything that happens in between leads to heartbreaking misery and beauty, a strange combination. We are often in our own way, and destroy that which we love. Sara is more than forgiving of others, a shame it takes so long to forgive herself for not being Emerson’s ‘biological’ mother, for not realizing she loves him as much as any mother could love a child they birthed. She doesn’t blame the child for his origins, and she steps up in spite of feeling she isn’t mother material, shamed he may feel unwanted after-all, his mother rejected him and Sara’s own words after his birth were, “I don’t want him.” But as Emerson comes of age, he is such a wonderfully sweet endearing boy that who couldn’t love him like a son? Sara is such a beautiful soul, the wounds to her pride, church going or not, she makes right from the start in mothering Emerson. Then there is LC, whom is pressed to hate Emerson, but just doesn’t- a child can move beyond their parent’s hateful ways. LC and Emerson should be the best of friends, the boy at heart is more a man than his father ever will be. “His father had called them heathens for being unchurched, but LC knew better. He’d felt their hearts. And in his few short years of life, he already knew that’s where all truth lies.” So let not the reader ignore the strength in the awful Luther’s son, LC.
Not all love stories are romantic, some are the love between a mother and her child. One Good Mama Bone moved me as a mother, because there are moments in any mother’s life (biological or not) that we just don’t feel we’re are as good as we can be, that we are hurting our children for being a flawed creature. But that is the very thing that makes us human, we are imperfect. The terrible cruelness of Sara’s own mother in itself is an example, an example of what is lacking, of who not to be. There is always something to learn from any mother. This is quiet southern fiction at it’s best, it requires the characters to grow, but will all of them learn before it’s too late? Some, but not all.
Publication Date: February 14, 2017
Story River Books/ The University Press of South Carolina
Do read the foreword by the author Mary Alice Monroe as well as the acknowledgements, it’s always interesting to discover how a story is born.
Angela M, Reviewer
I just read a book about a woman who talks to a cow and discovers that she can learn something from this cow and this city born and raised girl liked it. Well, it's not really about only that, although Big Red and her steer Lucky are a big part of the story, it's about so much more. It's about poverty and infidelity and a gift - a little boy named Emerson Bridge and the strength that one pulls from deep within when you can't see that it's there. It's about some devious people as well as good people and about friendship, about love and what constitutes family.
Sarah Creamer lives a hard life . It's the early 1950's in rural South Carolina. Her husband drinks his paycheck, her best friend gives birth to her husband's baby and Sarah is left with the little boy, feeling an obligation to care for him even though she has the feeling that she doesn't have "one good mama bone" in her body. Her priority becomes to make sure she can feed Emerson Bridge and keep a roof over his head even though she thinks, "I don't know how to be no good mama" - Sarah was wrong. She discovers that if she can get a steer, it would provide a buddy for her son as well as make some money if the steer wins a contest. Problems arise when others have their sights on the same prize, problems that make for an unexpected ending.
I'm not surprised that it was selected by Pat Conroy for Story River Books imprint . This is a well written debut and certainly a story of the south, but mostly a story whose themes are shared no matter where you live. I will definitely watch for more from McClain.
I received an advanced copy of this book from University of South Carolina Press (Caitlin Hamilton Marketing) through NetGalley .
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